I am of the opinion that great teachers are as rare as geniuses and most teachers tend to do more harm than help by spoiling the joy of learning into pointless drudgery: gems of enlightments and lessons smashed into a field of useless litter. So, with my son's education, I've let him fend for himself from the start in order to force him to learn how to learn like how a mountaineer would learn how to climb, with only occasional basecamp-level advices from me.

All is well except my son didn't do so well in algebra this year. Egads. It was time for another basecamp talk. So I spent 10 minutes showing him the bareass simplicity of algebra. It's really all about nothing except common sense and tossing cowchips over fences for fun and convenience, I pounded. He seemed to take that well.

Encouraged, I spent another 10 minutes on the huge store of fun waiting to be had in mathematics. It's as fun as video games if not more, I said jumping up and down. Oh oh. I think I overdosed him this time. I'll just have to wait for the next opportunity…

Parenthood sure is hard. I am still learning.