A few years ago, in addition to our own little children, my wife and I were the legal guardians for a few of her siblings. One of her brothers, who at the time was 13 years old, was struggling with learning Math in the local Middle School.
I would spend hours every week sitting down with him to help him understand the math he was expected to be learning for his class. Even with my contribution he really struggled.
The next school year the Alpine School District adopted a new math curriculum called Investigations math based on a Constructivist philosophy of learning. To be fair there are some portions of Educational Contructivism that I agree with, but the applied Contructivism of the Investigations program turned out to be a really terrible way to learn math.
