One thing I really dislike about our current school situation regarding math is the period at the start of every year where the almost exclusive focus is on drilling on basic facts, to get ready for testing ... This winds up in reducing even further the time spent each year on instruction on new skills and concepts, and thus negatively impacts all the children who are strong in math.
You've just described the basic model for public and much of private math education in the United States (don't know about elsewhere; ColinsMum and others?). I believe that the general model is to go over last year's stuff until November. Only then do the kids get to learn something new. For kids like mine who do math all summer, this approach is toxic.
I think that repetition can be damaging when used as a blunt tool without much thought on the part of the teacher. Take the worksheet problems DD8 had been doing frequently until this week. Last week's she had to do 20-35 problems of the type 64*3
per night. It was the same last year when these problems were "new." She didn't even need to do
one of those problems, but had to waste as much as a half-hour on them (this was simply the time it took to write everything). This got me thinking about struggling students. If my DD needed 20-30 minutes to do them, how much time would a struggling student need? And how tired would the kid be, presumably with yet more homework ahead?
