I've got 2 really smart boys in elementary school. My wife and I are amazed at how bad the math education is. Our observations, based on a few kid-years of school across both a public and a private school:
- In an attempt to make math easier to learn, they're teaching math really abstractly. "skip counting" and a bunch of other stuff. It's basically all the tricks you figure out after you understand what you're doing, but they're teaching the tricks and not the math itself. - Further to the last one, they don't teach things like times tables. Rather than just getting kids to memorize the times tables, they make them go through all these hoops to get them further along. I realize that times tables are no fun, but neither is struggling through every problem. - Most teachers are not good at math. One teacher would send problems that didn't make any sense. I sat through a presentation by the teachers on the "new math" and it was clear they really don't know what they're doing, they're just teaching an algorithm. - Most teachers don't like math. How do you instill a sense of love for something that you hate?
Many of these things go for other subjects too. It's just that it's more obvious in math.