marathoner452

Oh, I know. Also, I know I must have told you the story about how, when I was volunteering at New Orleans Outreach, we had a group of 6th-8th graders who couldn't do more than one-digit subtraction, and after about a week of trying to figure it out it became clear that they had just been told that subtraction was "taking the difference" between two numbers and had just been applying that principle for everything as best they could (so, e.g. in a column where you have "1-8" the answer is always "7")? There was a lot more than that, but for some reason that one thing was just appalling to me, I guess because of how obvious it was that the kids had even been trying and doing everything right and being able to even make it to school in the first place and so on and so forth and the system still failed them simply because of careless teaching...