When I was in 4th grade in Germany in the 90ies, the teacher once asked a classmate of mine to come to the blackboard. She asked her to write thirty-one ("einunddreißig", or "one and thirty"). She wrote "13", and the whole classroom exploded with laughter.
I guess this is how you instill math phobia in children.
As an American South(east)ern kid, I was convinced either my ears were broken or I was dumb, because I couldn't understand how to count syllables in a word.
I understood the method the teacher explained...
... but I would always come up with the wrong number when listening in testing.
I finally asked my mother, who informed me that it's just the southern accent throwing me off, and the word 'that' shouldn't actually be pronounced the way my teacher was ('tha-yat').
So I feel childish academic bewilderment through no fault of their own. :(
In recent years I have seen a number of arguments break out in a game that requires single syllable answers. It is fascinating to see the disagreement over words like "orange" and several others I never would have imagined.
I still remember confidently explaining to our teacher that the grammatical choice was always the one that sounded right, and being taken aback when she said other kids grew up where that rule of thumb wouldn't work.
I was born in Poland and we moved to Germany when I was a kid. As a child I learned it quite easily (and fortunately I was on a school full of migrant children - today you would call it "Problemschule" here in Germany, I guess - so nobody laughed at me), but my parents still don't get used to it after more than 30 years and struggle with it on a daily basis.
I'm a native German speaker and I have very strong feelings about this because it still trips me up when transcribing number groups by ear. If you ask me to write something down, spell out every digit individually so I don't have to pause every time to find out if you are going to say e.g. "drei", "dreißig" or "dreiundzwanzig". And for the love of god don't say "und" (and) before the final group either. But then again, even three digit groups pose problems (especially when the final group has fewer digits) - is the pause in "einhundert ... dreiundzwanzig" because it's two numbers or because you hesitated?
Learning German as a foreign language, that was one of the painful aspects. Also, who thought it was a good idea to have /dreißig/ sound so much like /dreizehn/?
Anyway…
I guess this is how you instill math phobia in children.