I'm also a math teacher, and agree that there's something about American culture that's really messing with mathematics education. As a student, I was always an

I'm also a math teacher, and agree that there's something about American culture that's really messing with mathematics education. As a student, I was always annoyed by applications questions. Not because I have anything against applications, but because they were usually contrived, and often outside of my field of study. There were all sorts of physics questions that would pop up in the lower math classes (Never took physics) that I could do the math for, but had no reasonable physical intuition about how the system in question should actually behave. I was mostly just crunching numbers.