It's the phrase, "I'm just no good at math" that breaks my heart. Most of the time, the student is taking the blame that belongs to the education industry.

Last week, my son had a "Chapter 9" math test here in a top-ranked Silicon Valley public school. His teacher pointed us to an official study guide PDF, which we went over carefully. I was not at all surprised to find that it covered a random grab bag of unrelated topics: sorting a half-dozen fractions, each with different denominators, two different silly algorithms for multidigit multiplication, how many $2.30 widgets can you buy for $9.00, and a few others.

This incoherent, random presentation of unrelated topics within a single chapter is totally characteristic of the "reform math" so beloved by our "progressive educators." They despise the approach of methodically working through a small number of carefully sequenced topics, making sure that the foundation of layer N is solid before getting to work building the closely related layer N+1 on top of it. They call it, "drill and kill," "soul-crushing," and "creativity destroying."

Instead of mastering a few closely-related concepts each year and systematically building expertise, they prefer "exposing" kids briefly to lots of unrelated math ideas, trusting that some kids will get some of it, and telling the rest to "trust the spiral," meaning trust that when they hop, skip, and jump over multiple topics the following year and the year after that, most of them will eventually "get" most of the stuff.

The result is that many parents just teach their kids real math outside of school. Many in our neighborhood send them to Chinese school, which teaches them math in addition to Chinese. The Chinese school buses line up in front of all of our local elementary schools at the end of each school day. (A lot of blond kids board those buses.) Some send them to Kumon, which is getting to be as common a sight around here as McDonalds or Starbucks.

I teach mine myself, using non-US curricula (Chinese, Japanese, and Singaporean in my case.) I feel terrible for the kids who don't have parents doing the schools' job for them, whose math skills are limited to what they can pick up from their classmates in "group discovery" sessions, since the "professional educators" have now decided that kids learn best what they discover for themselves and now serve merely as "guides on the side" in edu-speak.

My son took his Chapter 9 test and reported to me that, with the exception of testing the two different, useless multiplication algorithms, the test was a DIFFERENT grab bag of unrelated math topics, bearing little resemblance to the study guide. Totally typical of "reform math." He did fine, but only because he had learned all of it outside school. His friends who rely on what they learn at school think he's a genius.

So kids go through this ridiculous joke of a math education and can't do math. The school points at their friends who did just fine (because--shh!--they learned math elsewhere), the school takes credit for having taught them so well and tells the others and their parents, "well, not all kids are equally good at math, but many of your classmates learned quite well," clearly implying that the kids who didn't are somehow defective.

The result is that those kids will soon be saying, "I'm just no good at math." What a disgrace.