Oh, I wasn’t trying to be insulting. I think it’s a sign of 1) how legitimately hard “basic” math stuff is for a lot of people, and yeah, fractions seem to be t

Oh, I wasn’t trying to be insulting. I think it’s a sign of 1) how legitimately hard “basic” math stuff is for a lot of people, and yeah, fractions seem to be the earliest point at which a lot of (even actually, truly smart!) people stop really “getting it”, 2) people not getting why they should care, and never being sufficiently motivated to care—frankly a lot of math comes off not just as pointless, but like mathematicians are trolling the mere normals, as commonly presented, and 3) “math people” largely not getting that math beyond basic arithmetic actually doesn’t matter very much for a huge portion of jobs and lives, and that they’re failing as a field to communicate the ways in which it could. You might guess from the above that I’m pretty firmly in the camp that thinks “k-12 math just isn’t mathy enough and that’s why it’s bad” is dangerously wrong. You’d be right about that.