Earlier on there were some super out there ways we were forced to 'visualize math problems involving little coins thar were yellow on one side and red on another, I think red meant 10 and yellow meant ones and this was later elementary. Trying to get help from my folks with homework was exhausting for them cause they had to reverse engineer this weird shit into normal math. They had so many dumbass ways of approaching the same math problem that seemed cooked up by some mid 90s inner child gurus or something that doing math in a sorta normal way would get taught by my folks with what they remembered from school and then I'd fake the work I needed to show working backwards. Those were the teachers that didn't get mad at me for sucking at math. Don't even get me started on Around the World in 4th grade. The teacher had a book of math flash cards and we'd do one on one quick draw mental math against each other very publicly and one kid always just fucking swept, I didn't even try, that did teach me that sometimes there's greater reward in not trying. Winning didn't get you anything and trying made me stressed, the lesson is never try. Not really but it did teach me to examine a situation and determine a little more objectively whether I should have any mental stake in it. I didn't need to try to win at something I didn't wanna do that gained me nothing just because I was placed in a competition. That was useful, but they were trying to teach math