All Ages How is maths taught so poorly?

hedonologist

hedonologist

Legacy Member
Maths was always my strongest subject, so I speak with a degree of bias here, but how is maths taught so poorly and slowly in schools?

I don't see how the first ten years of maths can't be taught in a year., trigonometry and calculus is obviously a bit too far from most grade school students, but anything up to basic algebra could probably be taught in 50 hours, with 200 hours of review/exercise time.
 
I am going to be on the other side here and say that math isn't really my strongest subject. Back in high school, I struggled with math so much that I lag behind. When a new topic is introduced, I haven't even grasped the concept of the earlier topic. Though I didn't fail math then, I felt like I didn't know enough about it. Math never was my strongest subject because of this reason. I actually think that if they have taught it more slowly instead of bombarding us with topics after topics after topics, I might have learned it more. Or maybe they should have offered more classes for kids who cannot understand math so easily.
 
Math is not an easy subject to just breeze through it. There are students that excelled in this subject but there are also a lot of students that have problems with it. Unlike History subject where you can just read, you need to know all the correct methods to calculate the answers correctly. The best thing to do for me is to just breeze through the easy or basic parts so that they can focus on the difficult part, because I see a lot of teachers that waste a lot of time teaching the easy stuff when 95% of the students already know how to do it.
 
I didn't have too much of a problem with maths when I was at school but it has to be taught correctly. There is a great amount of stigma surrounding the subject, but I think that if it's handled correctly most students could actually enjoy it.
 
Math is also not my strongest point when I was still studying. I remember having to ask a friend who was taking up an Engineering course for help with my Physics subject when I was still in college. I guess learning fast about a subject also depends on one's interest. People have different strong points that's why it's understandable how some can easily grasp a specific subject while some cannot but they do excel in other subjects they are passionate about.
 
I think it does depend on the person. I've never had trouble myself with mathematics - in fact, I'm studying it in university at the moment - but a good number of my friends when I was younger do have trouble with it. Perhaps the slow teaching of mathematics in primary school is to compensate for the different learning speeds of children. Obviously for those who are more mathematically inclined, the slow pace will bother and annoy them; but for those who are less adept with numbers, the slower pace might be just right.
 
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