[jacobolus]

Indeed. It’s much better to practice basic arithmetic in the context of solving some harder problem than to just drill on worksheets of completely repetitive trivial problems for years on end.

Unfortunately, it takes much more teacher skill (e.g. to assess individual gaps in student understanding), doesn’t scale as well to large class sizes (ideally problems should to be catered to the ability level of each individual student), and isn’t as easy to assess with standardized tests.