kids get very little repetition on any one skill.
Oh yea this is soooo true. My DS10 has a math test pretty much every 4 days on some new concept. They move very, very, very fast in math. Luckily he catches on pretty easily and the teacher does do comprehensive tests every few weeks to make sure they are getting it, but there is virtually no drill involved. You have to move fast to keep up!
Do you know what curriculum it is? We are using 1st grade Everyday Math and it does have this kind of model. But it still seems very slow. And the spiraling! I swear it was after x-mas break when we actually got a NEW concept. I got a note today that it was a goal by the end of the year to have the kids memorize a small sub set of single digit addition. I'm quite sure we knew the whole addition table in first grade. I did go to an extremely kill and drill private Catholic school. We memorized incessantly without reason - all the presidents, countries and capitols, etc etc etc. So great for visual spatial me.
I'm saying this as a mathy person with a mathy kid that goes to a very NCLB test score focused school. This is a school that hired a full time teacher this year just to focus on bringing up math scores for the bottom third of the class.
I remember sitting and learning long division trying to figure out WHY it worked. When I taught DS addition and subtraction with renaming I had to come up with a proof with manipulatives why this really worked. Once we did that, he was good to go. But before that, he didn't want anything to do with it. That and he can do a lot of 2 and 3 digit addition and subtration in his head.
