This is so true. I'm Black and attended one of the worst performing elementary schools in my city for the first four years of school, which gave me an awful bas

This is so true. I'm Black and attended one of the worst performing elementary schools in my city for the first four years of school, which gave me an awful base for my math learning when I was finally transferred to a much higher performing school in a Jewish neighborhood on the other side of the city, not to mention high school and college. Only when I started working in programming did a lot of algebra and trig click (probably helps my first junior role threw me in the deep end working with linear algebra and trigonometry in animation and was lucky to have a senior around who chose to take on a mentor role). Math in public schools is basically magical spell incantation and it appears to most kids that you either have "it" or you don't. Math is a subject I believe requires long-term work that doesn't easily fit into the grade pass/fail structure of school, but then again a lot of aspects of mass education are fundamentally broken.