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As a veteran algebra teacher, I worry about Medford's newly adopted Bridges Math curriculum for kindergarten through fifth grade, "designed to help students master algebra by or before the ninth grade." (MT article, June 24) How will these K-5 math lessons be effectively coordinated with rigorous algebra courses taught years later in other schools? The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has a long history of veering among various methods for teaching math. In the 1960s, when I was a graduate student at UCLA, "set theory" was the underlying concept for the "new math"; in the 1980s I was teaching algebra when "discovery math" and calculators-for-all trumped memorized facts and algorithms; today the "experts" recognize that certain facts and skills must be practiced and memorized. With each pendulum swing, many of these experts profit from authoring new textbooks, which school districts buy with taxpayer dollars. That the NCTM endorses Bridges Math is not reassuring. You report that Oregon's new math standards follow recommendations of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel "appointed by former President George W. Bush to find ways to improve U.S. students' performance in math." Ah yes, Bush's "scientifically based" learning. Another example is his "Reading First" program, which has not been widely beneficial except to publishers of all those costly reading materials. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act is recognized as badly flawed and is now being reworked by the Obama administration. Bill Gates publicly admitted his Small Schools Initiative "did not improve students' achievement in any significant way." "Cooperative learning" was another panacea that petered out. The only thing new under the education sun seems to be experimentation on our children. And dedicated classroom teachers are often caught in the undertow. Despite being retired, I will always identify with teachers and the challenges they face. Math is a cumulative subject in which students build a foundation for learning new content by mastering properly sequenced skills and concepts. These include computing with whole numbers, fractions, decimals and percents; operating with positive and negative numbers and exponents; solving equations and inequalities; manipulating variables; graphing data; finding area, perimeter and volume of geometric figures; setting up and solving word problems. I wonder if classroom algebra teachers contributed to the creation of Oregon's new elementary math standards and the selection of the Bridges Math learning materials. The newly adopted curriculum is for kindergarten through fifth grade; the goal is for all students to succeed in algebra by ninth grade. Elementary teachers are truly multitalented; they teach everything from reading, math and science to social studies and the arts. But few K-5 teachers would be comfortable teaching algebra; often they are not even familiar with the content, having taken the course decades ago. I spent my career teaching pre-algebra and algebra 1, and earned an A in a college course in calculus. Yet I could no more teach calculus to seniors than teach reading and writing to third graders; I greatly admire those who do. So when a school district like Medford adopts the new Bridges Math curriculum for K-5 students, to prepare them to succeed in algebra in grades 8 or 9, one hopes experienced algebra teachers were involved in the process. As the Bridges Math learning materials influence the teaching of elementary math, what role will secondary math teachers play? It is the algebra teachers who understand what content is covered in algebra and what prerequisite skills and concepts are required for success. Are they participating in the once-a-decade purchase of K-5 math materials? Their perspective would surely promote valuable coordination among those who teach math to our children. Betty R. Kazmin of Medford taught algebra for 20 years in Los Angeles public and private secondary schools, and was a member of the board of education in Willard, Ohio.