My mom was the same way. I remember a particularly challenging (to me) elementary school word problem, involving a fictional system of currency. She went to a b

My mom was the same way. I remember a particularly challenging (to me) elementary school word problem, involving a fictional system of currency. She went to a box of Trix cereal, we decided which cereal pieces corresponded to which fictional currency units in the word problem, and then we started doing transactions with the cereal, until I finally figured out the answer to the problem. I found out later that she hated math, and thought she was bad at it (she really wasn't, but that's another issue entirely...). However, she never let me see that, which was fantastic.