Math education in the 80’s from the student’s perspective

When I was in school so many years ago math was a sore subject. The lessons were boring with a capital B. Most lessons consisted of a teacher showing an example of the procedure and a long list of problems to solve. Long division was most dreaded because one problem could take the entire page to solve.  Beware if a step was miscalculated. One small misstep in calculation would throw off the entire answer and the division problem could go on indefinitely.