Maybe I'm wrong, but I have always believed that if you want people to be good at math, it's their first years of education which are important, not the last ones. In other worlds, push for STEM should be present in kindergartens and elementary schools. By the time people go to high school it is to late.
I never had any problems with math until I went to university, so I was merely a passive observer of everyday struggle for some people. I honestly believe that foundations are the key. Either you're taught to think critically, see patterns and focus on the train of thought, or you focus on numbers and memorization.
The latter obviously fails at some point, in many cases sufficiently late to make it really hard to go back and relearn everything.
Math is extremely hierarchical and I believe schools do not do enough to make sure students are on the same page. If we want to fix teaching math, I would start there, instead of working on motivation and general attitude. Those are consequences, not the reasons.
I never had any problems with math until I went to university, so I was merely a passive observer of everyday struggle for some people. I honestly believe that foundations are the key. Either you're taught to think critically, see patterns and focus on the train of thought, or you focus on numbers and memorization.
The latter obviously fails at some point, in many cases sufficiently late to make it really hard to go back and relearn everything.
Math is extremely hierarchical and I believe schools do not do enough to make sure students are on the same page. If we want to fix teaching math, I would start there, instead of working on motivation and general attitude. Those are consequences, not the reasons.