Most elementary schools have all subjects taught by one teacher. (At least mine did; my K-12 education was entirely in the US public school system.) Kids taki

Most elementary schools have all subjects taught by one teacher. (At least mine did; my K-12 education was entirely in the US public school system.) Kids taking different subjects from different teachers doesn't happen until middle or high school. So I'd guess that most teachers of young kids probably chose to train as elementary-education generalists, and math was hard and scary for them. There are several mechanisms by which this might rub off on their pupils: 1. If the teacher doesn't have an innate joy and passion for their subject, the lack of enthusiasm may be contagious. 2. The teacher may have no idea why things like the addition algorithm work, and no idea how to explain it to their students. 3. Most of the math classes in elementary school were largely spent reviewing material covered in previous years. Having an expectation that students should know material that's been covered in previous lectures is simple common sense. I'm not against an occasional review class, mind you, but spending an entire quarter or semester on nothing but previously covered material strikes me as a colossal waste of everyone's time. 4. High-stakes standardized testing is a recipe for disaster. The tests don't accurately measure anything but the amount of time and effort teachers spend teaching to the test. I was pretty far out of elementary school by the time No Child Left Behind hit the fan, but I'd imagine even knowledgeable, passionate teachers who want to motivate their students with the joy of learning to use their imagination to manipulate abstract ideas get immense pressure from above to turn their class into nothing but drill, drill, drill. 5. The very name, "No Child Left Behind," implies is that the goal is to have the entire class proceed at the pace of the least capable student. On the face of it, this is deliberately aiming for poor results. For those of us who have never observed the human race in action before, let me explain: People are different; they have different levels of mental strength, motivation, talent, and parental support; they have different areas of interest, different areas of talent, put in different amounts of effort, and think in different ways. It is inevitable, then, that some people will be better at math than others. But we seem to be trying extremely hard to deny this simple and obvious truth, to bring the least capable students to a level of competence that they may never achieve, at great cost to taxpayers and immense frustration for everyone. Meanwhile, the middle- and high-capability tiers of the class are bored, frustrated and alienated by the endless repetition of very dull tasks -- which is most assuredly not what mathematics is about, especially since the invention of cheap, ubiquitous computers.