Yeah, timed math seems utterly horrible.

I have a terrible memory from about grade 3 or something of doing a homework assignment where they gave me a bunch of problems and said that I should be able to do them in five minutes. I couldn't, and I broke down in tears when I realized I couldn't. To her credit, my mother -- no lover of math -- told me that it seemed crazy for there to be a timer on this sort of work.

I wound up loving math anyway, but it gave me a taste of the weirdly deep shame that traditional math instruction can generate in kids. No wonder so many of them decide they hate the subject and avoid it!

The idea of timed math tests doesn't even make much sense when you think about how the mathematical imagination works. Countless stories of mathematics breakthroughs are tales of very slow and longitudinal thinking processes -- i.e. someone pondering a mathematical problem, hitting a wall, setting it aside, coming back to it days or weeks or months later, hitting another wall, setting it aside again, until some point months or even years later, voila: They have an insight that solves the problem. That's what mathematical thinking actually looks like! It's immersive and obsessive, yes; but it's also languid and imaginative, and flows organically. It's not done with an instructor sitting there with a timer, telling you the test is over in 30 minutes.