I'm a firm believer that a not insignificant portion of people had one or two really shit math teachers at some point, decided that they're bad at math because of it, and then proceeded to just give up. Very often it was specifically related to fractions.

The math professors at my uni were fantastic, and I saw many friends who always thought they were bad at math have lightbulb moments where something finally clicks.

I was told by one of my kids teachers that teaching my second grader to carry the one was wrong.

Also they were basically doing algebra in the beginnging just not using letters. Ie: 1 + __ = 9 , fill in the blank. So I taught my kids to just put x in the blank part and solve for x. Teacher said I was teaching them bad habits.

I am still flabbergasted. My kid is not a math wiz to this day, but I’m pretty sure the strategies im teaching them are the only things getting them by. I’ve taken to teaching them dice games like 10,000/Farkle and making them keep score.

I still continue to cheat/take shortcuts because I need to ensure I pass because if I don't, I wasted thousands of dollars. If I had the luxury of actually learning rather than performing well on tests, I could have been a better student.

Parents perpetuating the myth of the “math gene” they don’t have because they failed at the "new math " of the 1970s, etc.

This is a huge reason why I've never been able to help my daughter with her math homework. I learned to do things a totally different way from the way they teach now.

I struggled with any math basically beyond fifth grade. It was incredibly hard for me. Math continued to build on the previous year until I worked my ass off to get C's. Every year after that I got C's all while spending hours and hours studying the homework and equations and doing problem after problem. I was in remedial math at community college. The only reason I passed college algebra was because the homework was online and I was able to do every problem over and over again until I got it right. That was 14% of my grade and got me up to a C.

Some people don't get the support they need. In a subject like math that is detrimental.

You can say "fuck" here, it's ok.

I tutor college students. While many students struggled with math before the pandemic, the fallout from the changes made during the pandemic made these deficiencies so much worse.

I don’t think the pandemic is to blame for this.

It's not. It has been a problem for years.

Yeah... I started college back in 2013 and had a roommate that didn't know order of operations...

I think we're failing trying to focus too much on quantity over quality. There were tricks I didn't learn until college that someone should've taught me years ago. Things my parents learned that stayed with them for decades nobody ever bothered to tell me, and occasionally either they or someone from their generation would just say something like "9 * something adds up to 9 (e.g. 9 * 5 = 45, 4 + 5 = 9)", "move the decimal place and multiply by two to calculate the tip", "i before e except after c."

But nope, didn't learn that, instead I "learned" 3 different ways to do the same thing for solving various algebra situations and at 28 remember none of them. I feel very sorry for the common core kids, I expect them to retain even less with common core's embrace of this approach. Teaching people multiple ways to do something is great, but ultimately the teacher is going to use one, and they're going to move too fast for you to translate "their way" into "your way" (at least that was my experience in high school math when I tried to do it a way different than what the teacher was teaching).

As a dad constantly frustrated with the shittiness of my kids’ math curriculum: thanks, this is wonderful, puts to words a lot of what I’ve been feeling and more.

Yep. I've always been bad at math, I still am, but at least college math was interesting even though I didn't get it very well.

The hardest maths are usually in their junior or senior year in high school. It's reasonable to believe that if they weren't challenged to make the connections it didn't stick. Just because they learned the fundamentals doesn't mean they went and manipulated them in the manner they need to be familiar with for higher learning.

They're called weedout classes, and they're designed to be hard.

Well it turns out that the SAT and College Admissions/grades are all on a curve. Hell, even real life is relatively on a curve.