[Qem]

I also dislike it. As a small child, I remember hating the boredom of needing to learn by rote the times tables at school. That left my appreciation of mathematics scarred for many years. Only when I was approaching my teens I started to like math again, when presented geometry at school. That makes me think, does this traumatic experience with arithmetic tables right at the beginning is what gives math a bad reputation among lots of students, setting them in a course to hate the subject for life? Sometimes I think it would have been better for society to settle in a number system with a smaller base, say 8 or 6, instead of 10, so the tables got a lot smaller (64 or 36 entries, respectively, instead of 100), giving young students a better experience with aritmethics from the outset.