Whoa, thanks. I'm not quite as Math-impaired as I'm playing up for Wee Hob, and I have among my many surprising skills an ability to ask probing questions as if I'm really interested in the answer-- a legacy of my first job doing market research phone interviews. Plus, much as I suck at some things math, I really do find the ideas kinda neat. Again, I think it's the way my mind can pick up concepts, but not actual execution.

Wee Hob is getting kind of excited about our doing homework together and teaching me his math next year and beyond. I have no doubt I'll have to take you up on your kind offer eventually. My high school math teacher took a semester long coffee break and left us to struggle through preCalc analysis on our own. We got the right answers, but to this day I can't understand why. Functions made no sense to me. And I chickened out and didn't go on to Calculus proper.

The main thing I'm going for now, though, is to get him having fun, but also taking responsibility for his education. If somebody had just bothered to explain Why we were doing stuff way back when, more than "It's good for you and you'll need it later" I think it would have made all the difference for me. Heinlein has a great essay in one of his books of short stories about the importance of Math-- I need to try to dig it up somewhere and see if it's as good as it struck me when I stumbled across it in grad school.

Long answer; short one is, Thanks.