conuly

It's also possible that you just don't remember your lessons in elementary school that clearly. I cannot tell you how many times I've gotten into it with people who say, in all sincerity, that it only took a day or a week for their entire class to learn how to do long division (or multi-digit addition and subtraction, or multiplication and division of fractions, or how to do any arithmetic using negative numbers).

None of them have ever been able to tell me what the hell their class did for the other 39 weeks of the school year, not to mention the remaining few years before moving into prealgebra. It's like they remember exactly one math lesson and believe, therefore, it's the only one they ever had.

(I do remember, actually, that in 8th grade we seemed to spend a lot of time going over and over and over negative numbers. Our teacher was really big on cumulative review, but more than that, when I taught the niblings I discovered that they just could not internalize things like "If you start out with 5 - x, and then you subtract 5 from both sides, one side will be left with -x - not "just x"! We spent so much time going over the basic concept of "how to work with negative numbers". When they went to high school they each came back and reported to me, independently, that their classmates all really struggled and they were glad I'd spent so much time drilling them on that specific thing the year before. It turns out that for most students negative numbers are conceptually easy enough to grasp, but doing anything with them past putting them on a number line involves a major cognitive leap. If I remembered my 8th grade math teacher's name I might look her up to thank her! I did not appreciate her efforts nearly enough.)