Yes, yes, and absolutely yes! I'm a high school math and physics teacher (who majored in physics, not education, and is now doing self-study in more proof-based mathematics), and so much the issue is in grade school, in my opinion. The teachers there don't appreciate math. And, more than that, they don't understand math. Lots of them don't have a good well-developed number sense, so it's no wonder our kids don't either!
Then the problems compound when they just give kids calculators without the kids understanding why the calculator works, and by the time they get to high school hope is lost because they have no number sense and we're trying to explain variables and such...often divorced from real life. I've found my kids get a much more intuitive sense of slope when I explain it as the rate of change rather than "rise over run" that they're so often taught in middle school. Give them examples, like amusement park tickets (it cost $50 to get there, then $70 per person) and have them incorporate that into a slope-intercept form. It just makes things so much clearer that they often don't get because they don't have the number sense and because many teachers don't understand/appreciate math.
Then the problems compound when they just give kids calculators without the kids understanding why the calculator works, and by the time they get to high school hope is lost because they have no number sense and we're trying to explain variables and such...often divorced from real life. I've found my kids get a much more intuitive sense of slope when I explain it as the rate of change rather than "rise over run" that they're so often taught in middle school. Give them examples, like amusement park tickets (it cost $50 to get there, then $70 per person) and have them incorporate that into a slope-intercept form. It just makes things so much clearer that they often don't get because they don't have the number sense and because many teachers don't understand/appreciate math.