Grace swayed and sang about Disney’s cartoon duo Chip and Dale as a math teacher presented a complex problem involving quadratics while others looked on.

Guessing also becomes cumbersome for quadratics with large numbers, and it only works neatly for problems that are contrived to have integer answers.

"The same thing is true with college," Prof Hacker says, adding that there are thousands of Americans without a high school or college diploma, simply because they were forced to take quadratics.

The polynomials are limited to quadratics and have no squared terms: each polynomial pi has the form with .

Then, last year, she joined a new “academy” within her school, where her teachers started introducing lessons beyond her grade level on matrices and quadratics and geometry.