About 20 years ago, my public middle school tried to teach this new-fangled thing called “connected math“ that was conceptual and without notation or symbols, s

About 20 years ago, my public middle school tried to teach this new-fangled thing called “connected math“ that was conceptual and without notation or symbols, so I didn’t start learning real algebra until 9th grade when I went to private school. I was a year or more behind the rest of my peers (and in fact, my school had to open up a special section for me and one other person (!) to teach us algebra) and I constantly felt embarrassed. In college I went on to do well at linear alg and learned enough to hand wave my way through abstract alg so I ended up enjoying myself, but I’ve always felt resentful about being so far behind my peers and feeling like I needed to work harder than them. To this day I feel like I’m still playing catch up. Hearing about kids being set back in math makes me very personally angry because I always felt that my college CS studies would have been so much easier had I been equipped with the proper math fundamentals. This shit takes a long time to train and you really can do powerful things with it.