Yes, I have seen this kind of thing.
In my son's 6th grade class, An Honors, essentially pre-algebra class. My son had a few packets of math problems sent home as homework, that would have been very easy to solve with algebra. But there were NOT supposed to use algebra, they were supposed to set up these "graphs" and try and do the problems by drawing graphs for each step of the way. My son had real problems with doing it this way, it didn't seem intuitive at all. Since he was having difficulty I looked at it, and it took me a while to figure out what they wanted. Drove my son & I both up the wall. They weren't particularly easy problems to solve this way, two equations & two unknown kind of problems. I don't really think it helped my DS at all, he has always had an easy time with math concepts and honestly just confused things.
