>Do schools really not teach the underlying concepts of math, or do people just fail to understand them the first time through and then blame their teachers? I

>Do schools really not teach the underlying concepts of math, or do people just fail to understand them the first time through and then blame their teachers? It is absolutely the case that a great many students will not remember seeing material that they definitely were exposed to. As someone who's TA'd physics classes for a few years, I'd often ask a recitation whether they'd covered some particular subject yet in lecture, and they'd often say (as a class) no. I'd ask the professor later, and of course they had -- but students rarely go into lecture having done the reading or prep work, and so have a piss-poor retention rate.