[ams6110]

I agree. I hated math up until 8th grade. My 7th grade math teacher suggested I take algebra, which was the "advanced" option for 8th grade math. I have no idea why, because my math grades were very average, but he must have seen something or had a hunch.

It was like a light bulb went on. Math went from being rote drudgery to something that I could see had some useful purpose. I enjoyed math from that point on.

[bluedino]

I enjoyed math. I loved it.

What I hated was doing 50 homework problems for every type of whatever it was we were learning that day. Even if the answers to have odd-numbered ones were in the back of the book.

Once an equation or soomething 'clicked', I got it. There was no point of doing 50 of them, each slightly different than the last.

[darkwizard42]

I'd argue that you are in the minority here. Most people (especially children) require repetition and depth of work to master a skill / understand a strategy.

In my experience (having watched a LOT of my friends go through varying degrees of good/bad public schools in NJ) most kids really do need the repetition. Without it they don't hammer in why something like adding 2x to each side of an equation cancels out -2x on one side, even if the last problem had you balancing an equation by adding 4x+5 to each side. These concepts might seem absolutely trivial to us now, but as a person first approaching them I think they can be pretty complex.

[peteradio]

How many times did you make a mistake on those questions and learn a new pitfall regardless of whether you new the equation?

[Izkata]

As someone else who was in the same situation: In a way that additional problems would help, almost never. All my mistakes at that point were the equivalent of typos, things like dropping a sign from one line to the next.

[dr_dshiv]

In my school, the more advanced math classes had less homework. Calculus had none. Talk about incentives to succeed!!