Another parent's point of view: I'd interpret "open to trying something" as "desperately searching for a curriculum that will allow them magically to teach math without understanding it." A lot of elementary school teachers are desperately afraid of math. You should have seen the relief in the eyes of my son's second grade teacher when I offered to teach him math at home (totally against the rules I should add as my condition was that he get out of school early). And she was a really good teacher, in other subjects.

If there's a solution I think it's to hire and train math specialists to teach elementary students, and to have even the youngest students rotate to math class. This is done in other countries.

The problem in elementary math as I see it is not the curricula but the teachers. (I wonder if some bad curricula get a boost because they're first tested with teachers who could teach math from the back of a cereal box.) And I don't say this because I'm down on teachers but because I think they're really important. Any curriculum in math that tries to bypass the teacher (to be "teacher-proof") is going to fail. Any teacher who tries to teach math to a classroom full of kids without understanding the math, without working the problems himself or herself, without being able to understand why kids make the mistakes they make, and without knowing how to correct them will also fail the students, especially the ones most in need of help.

Very good points. And very depressing ones, as I would guess anyone who loves math finding it very hard to choose to teach in second grade instead of in ninth grade, where the math is more interesting.

Well right now there isn't a job *only* teaching math in most elementary schools, but if it were a job there might well be people who would want it. I think my 5th grade teacher was a math major, and honestly that was the only thing she taught well. Maybe some of the people who train to teach special ed could instead be trained to teach math. I'm not being facetious -- if they were, there might be less need for special ed classes -- who knows?

The trick would be to convince people not to be embarrassed that they don't understand what it means to divide by a fraction (or whatever), then teach them how to do it. Sort of like the way AoPS teaches middle and high school students to solve problems they thought they couldn't solve. Then teach them to teach kids how to do it. They probably wouldn't be the same people who wanted to teach high school math -- you'd want people who actually did find elementary math interesting and could keep the class upbeat, and you wouldn't want to exacerbate the shortage of good upper-level math teachers.

Here's a link to a video of several elementary math classes in Hungary (if you need to register say you're a teacher -- everyone on this site teaches someone, right?):

http://www.teachers.tv/video/17878

While not everything here would translate easily to the US, you get a picture of the kind of people who could do well teaching math to young kids and be happy doing it.

Blue Morpho