Blog Six Is it the Children's fault that they don't know math skills or the teacher's?

In the span of elementary school children learn everything from their numbers, adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, graphs, fractions, probability and percents. In 2nd grade children are already expected to know adding and subtracting to perfection. Than, the teachers throw graphs and proportions at them. In my field work I can tell how overwhelmed some of the children are. A lot of them don't have their adding and subtracting skills down perfect yet and now we are throwing other math into the picture. I remember feeling overwhelmed myself and this is where students begin to give up on math at such a young age. Every student needs to have the basic skills down before moving on. I think that if schools have teachers that pull children who are really struggling in math out of the regular classroom and help instill these basic skills, than the children could excel. But, because we don't do this, the math we tried to teach them is to hard for them. Knowing that math is such a hard subject for children and knowing the importance of it, it would be effective if we had a specific math teacher in elementary school. Maybe for a half hour or so who came in the classroom and could help the main teacher with the math lesson. There could just be one or two of these teachers for a whole elementary school and each class could have math at a different time. It would also give us the opportunity to have two teachers in the class while students are working individually on math. Than, there could be two teachers to answer questions and two different perspectives on the math lesson. I think if we spent more time in elementary school working with students on adding and subtracting than it would be more affective in the long run. We need to make sure students fully know adding and subtracting before teaching them multiplying and dividing or we are just confusing them and not doing our jobs as teachers. Our job is to prepare these young kids for the future. Once they hit middle school they are expected and it is almost unacceptable for children to not know adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing perfectly. How can we blame the children  for not having these facts down? They are so young we can not expect them to understand the importance of knowing these facts. When children need to be learning and need to be gaining basic life math skills they are too preoccupied by everything else due to their immaturity level that is unavoidable. They do not yet have the capacity to know the importance of these facts. Our jobs as adult educated mature teachers is to give them the skills, therefore, once they reach middle school, high school and adult life they will never even have to think about the importance of these facts because they will be so natural to them. As teachers we should not allow these students to fall behind.