curriculum troubles

It may make me a bad teacher that I've never really looked too closely at the Math 90 curriculum. It's not that I haven't been teaching the curriculum, just that Math departments have everything set up so nicely normally it's not really necessary. For the most part, I trust my fellow teachers and what they tell me.

The French textbook I'm using doesn't really set stuff up in the way/order I usually would teach stuff - hence the investigating into the curriculum to see exactly what I should be doing. Now it's not that I'm not following the curriculum, cause I am - kinda sorta. Following it as closely as one can considering how obvious it is that elementary schools aren't following it.

Now I know not everything can be blamed on elementary schools, kids are awesome at the "we've never seen that before!" when in fact they saw it in your class, last week, two days in a row. However, from my gr 9s definite lack of skills, and how obviously I'm following what should be more gr 8 curriculum than gr 9, what to do? It's definitely not wrong to travel backwards in the curriculum, but it is annoying. Especially when now it makes sense as to why many grade 10s have difficulty with the course. Spend too much time teaching what they should already know and you aren't able to prepare them for what they will need to know next semester.

Now I know the Math curriculum is under a complete overhaul, which is all good, but who is to say teachers will do anything different? How do you remedy elementary teachers who love reading and hate math? (don't worry, the English teachers have the same complaints in reverse, I'm aware.)

Ok, so really I'm annoyed that while I was pretty aware we were teaching "grade 9 lite" I didn't think I was reviewing stuff that shows up in the grade 6 column. Blah.