My daughter is 7 she comes home and I help her with homework. Some of the math she comes home with I truly do not understand. The rest is the longest most tedious way to work a problem. No professional meaning engineer, physicist types could ever afford to draw out simple math like that. I love the op!
That's the problem is it's not math for engineers and scientists. It's math for people who flip burgers. We are educating a generation of burger flippers I am really glad I don't have kids and if I did they would be in private school. Back 30 years ago when standardized testing first came out most private schools opted out of the testing because we simply scored too high. Instead of a bell curve all students scored within 95%. That makes public schools look really bad and the test foolish.
A friend of mine is a kindergarten teacher and her classes usually have kids that may know their colors, numbers and letters and other kids that can read a newspaper and do some algebra. How to you teach in a situation like that? You bump the kindergartener to second grade and that's not fair to them.