[abstractbill]

Congrats on your progress!

Over the past few years, while homeschooling my daughters, I've come to see the way math is usually taught as horribly pathological. In the US, where we live now, it's often seen as a competitive activity -- almost like a sport. In the UK, where I grew up, that wasn't the case but still it was taught as this huge body of knowledge and skills with almost no motivation.

My daughters are so advanced in math and I really don't believe it's even mostly due to innate ability. It's because, just to take an easy random example, when we studied geometry our very first lesson was me pointing out that the word "geometry" just means "earth measuring", and it was useful for farmers to be able to do that. Or, when we proved the irrationally of sqrt(2), of course I entertained them with the tale of Hippasus being thrown into the sea by the Pythagoreans. For basically everything we've learned there are so many fun stories. It makes me sad that most students of math never get to hear them.

[pipes]

As a b and c grade student, who messed about, stumbled through a not very good info technology degree at university I definitely agree with this. The stories and lore are what makes me now so interested in programming and software engineering. I've pretty much taught myself everything programming related and that's what I work as too. I desperately want to learn math up to and including calculus as I feel like it's a hidden shame that I'm a programmer with not much math ability. I'm actually considering signing up for math academy.