Math: much to my dismay, continues to haunt me to this day

I HATE MATH! I always have. From the time I was a little kid and my dad would quiz me on flash cards; I don't like flash cards, let alone math flash cards. I'm gonna take my time in figuring out the answer(!), I don't need this added stress. Man, oh man. Math, seriously = the bane of my existence. I cried during my freshman and senior math finals in college... I really did (I passed, just so you know)... but that's neither here nor there, well, it's there, but I digress.

Now, I'm a math teacher. Granted it's "kindergarten" math, but still. Oooh! Did you notice those sarcastic quotation marks? Yeah. Didja? I say this snidely because I recently started teaching my FOUR YEAR OLDS (Korean aged five, but Danny just turned, so he was three before? Nooo; three year olds aren't that verbal... are they? I don't know any babies outside of the ones I teach.) place values and counting by tens. Hello! For real?! They just learned how to count to twenty; can't even add, and now you want them to figure out the one's and the ten's placements? Oh! And they can't even understand what I'm saying for the most part. Math is universal, yeah right!

I can blame the stupid workbook we use as much as I want, but in reality it's my fault for not looking ahead and seeing that this would be impossible stuff for them to process. I should've taught them counting by ten's before the place value thing, and then maybe p.v's would've been easier? Oh, these shoulda-coulda-woulda shenanigans! Tomorrow, I'm scrapping what we've already learned - well, at least going back and building on the confused foundation.

Teaching place value was confusing enough, but today we had to "fill in the missing numerals," line one started out with 1  __  3  4  __  __  7  __  __  10 and line two jumped to the 30's then 70's on line 4, 50's on line 5, 90's on line 6, and so on in the confusion. WHY?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!! That's not helping them learn the numbers, at all. Arthur was the only one who understood, and he flew through it. I spent the last 20 minutes flying around from Danny and Olivia to Roy and Alex, only to end with my head in my hands trying to think how I could re-work this; Danny said, "Oh!" with a sigh, Olivia whined, "Kate Teacher." Alex picked his nose and giggled, and Roy looked at me so sadly (I could see it coming) and burst into tears.

MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATH!!!!! I SHAKE MY FIST AT YOU!!!!!