> I'm in the US, and have one child who repeatedly could not complete math work during school, and would bawl and protest how stupid they were when given math homework at home.
My experience in the US is that the vast majority of math teachers, especially in primary school, don't understand math in the slightest and are abysmal at teaching math outside of rote memorization.
I knew a child that was learning about negative numbers and understood the role of primes in building the number line in 1st/2nd grade. They were learning from pure interest, but were excited by what negative numbers were about conceptually and found primes fascinating. These are the foundations of real mathematical thinking.
Seeing the student was advanced the school put the kid in a 4th grade math classes but then complained that the child didn't know the multiplication tables. Understanding multiplication tables is literally memorization, this child had never been given the task of memorizing them so couldn't possibly have memorized them. Memorizing tables says literally nothing about mathematical proficiency, whereas gaining the intuition that "subtracting a negative number is the same as adding it" requires mathematical reasoning. The teacher was unable to see this because they themselves had no notion that understanding things like inverse function in math are important tools for reasoning. The child was removed from that math class, and quickly started to see mathematics in school as uninteresting.
This is just one example, but I've ran across plenty of curious students where a math professor would be impressed but a 4th grade teacher would find them falling behind. My experience working with adults has been that most adults who think they are bad math, are more often than not ones that are getting caught up on issues with math that are good issues to have if you understand what's going on. People with a solid mathematical intuition will be confused by the rote mechanical explanations regurgitated by most elementary school teachers.
There are far more teachers that struggle at teaching math than students that struggle with learning it, but it's far easier to blame students. It's no wonder that many students grow to hate math in the US, because it feels they are being unfairly punished and they are.
You can't completely blame teachers either since the pay and respect teachers get in the US means that anyone who can do basic math will find a much better paying and rewarding job else where. In many Asian countries teachers are respected, and there is a possibility that you can attract people that understand the subject well enough to teach it.
Developing some fluency in basic arithmetic is a necessary step in correctly and quickly solving more complex problems. It is regrettably the school didn't take the obvious step: task the kid to memorize the multiplication table. A week later, the kid is ready to roll.
Learning to play a musical instrument is similar: there is some degree of practice and 'rote memorization' required to level up.
My experience in the US is that the vast majority of math teachers, especially in primary school, don't understand math in the slightest and are abysmal at teaching math outside of rote memorization.
I knew a child that was learning about negative numbers and understood the role of primes in building the number line in 1st/2nd grade. They were learning from pure interest, but were excited by what negative numbers were about conceptually and found primes fascinating. These are the foundations of real mathematical thinking.
Seeing the student was advanced the school put the kid in a 4th grade math classes but then complained that the child didn't know the multiplication tables. Understanding multiplication tables is literally memorization, this child had never been given the task of memorizing them so couldn't possibly have memorized them. Memorizing tables says literally nothing about mathematical proficiency, whereas gaining the intuition that "subtracting a negative number is the same as adding it" requires mathematical reasoning. The teacher was unable to see this because they themselves had no notion that understanding things like inverse function in math are important tools for reasoning. The child was removed from that math class, and quickly started to see mathematics in school as uninteresting.
This is just one example, but I've ran across plenty of curious students where a math professor would be impressed but a 4th grade teacher would find them falling behind. My experience working with adults has been that most adults who think they are bad math, are more often than not ones that are getting caught up on issues with math that are good issues to have if you understand what's going on. People with a solid mathematical intuition will be confused by the rote mechanical explanations regurgitated by most elementary school teachers.
There are far more teachers that struggle at teaching math than students that struggle with learning it, but it's far easier to blame students. It's no wonder that many students grow to hate math in the US, because it feels they are being unfairly punished and they are.
You can't completely blame teachers either since the pay and respect teachers get in the US means that anyone who can do basic math will find a much better paying and rewarding job else where. In many Asian countries teachers are respected, and there is a possibility that you can attract people that understand the subject well enough to teach it.