>>12849991Basically learned helplessness.
As a kid my teachers, my parents, my grandparents, my siblings, and my tutors all wanted to help me with math, but they all insisted on mutually incompatible methods of doing so and would chastise me if I used any of the methods unapproved of by whoever was "helping" me at the time regardless of whether it was effective at achieving the correct answer or not, while simultaneously gaslighting me and claiming they were all using the same method even when evidence of their sabotage was demonstrated.
Eventually I just checked out rather than be yelled at all the time did whatever was said by the person near me at the time but stopped even trying to comprehend what I was doing since I knew I would be told to throw out any method taught to me shortly afterwards anyways. It took years for me to stop having small panic attacks whenever I had to do math.
American education in general suffers from an overabundance of experimental but ultimately unhelpful methods of teaching leading to student apathy, but math especially seems to have a "new way of doing math" every other year and it only annoys and confuses students.
