I was asked to watch a neighbor's kid for an hour a while back, some sort of emergency, and while there the kid was doing his math homework. I'm no genius either but math has never been a problem for me. In grade school the multiplication tables were so drilled into us that by 5th grade I knew up to the 15 times table by heart. This kid was doing multiplication and was in the 4th grade at the time. When I saw what the break down was to do 10x11 I was shocked. I asked, what is that exactly? He answered, that's how to figure out the problem. I just sat back and watched in stunned silence. I wanted to correct the procedure so badly but didn't want to mess up how this kid had learned to figure out the problem.
When the parent got home I inquired what the heck was going on with the math nowadays. She replied, oh god, it's that idiotic common core math. Parents can no longer do math with their kids b/c anyone who was taught to do math traditionally can't figure out what the heck is going on.
I never looked into it b/c it doesn't effect me in the slightest, but they said, it's like they dumb it down so the even the slowest kids in the class can keep up. Remember, no child left behind anymore. But there are no times tables anymore, no flash cards, no memorization. It's terrible what they've done to math.
So. I may have spoken out of turn knowing nothing about it, but seeing it first hand for an hour, something that in my education would have taken 10 minutes took this kid over an hour, he wasn't done when I left, and hearing the parents complaint, seems like this might be part of the problem and not part of the solution...
That's all.