I think you have the right of it: it's hard to teach something like maths to someone who isn't curious or interested. And it is definitely difficult to hook som

I think you have the right of it: it's hard to teach something like maths to someone who isn't curious or interested. And it is definitely difficult to hook someone's attention. When my children were still babies and quite young I was reading Zvonkin's book, Math from Three to Seven. And when they reached that age I started playing games with them myself to try and introduce these ideas to them. Like Zvonkin I found that one of my kids was more keen than the other... but the only way to keep them hooked was to avoid the "M" word: maths. What I think helped was to remind ourselves that we were playing games. Any time I went into an area that required calculation: determining some value -- they would catch on to that and shut down. However if we stuck to exploration and fitting things together and exploring games together I could keep them interested for an hour some days. And as an adult that's what has kept me interested: Martin Gardners' articles in Scientific American and books; John Conway's playfulness (ONAG, the bloody game of life, etc) -- the stuff that wasn't simply rote calculation which I find many attempts at practical applications seem to focus on. I can appreciate definitions and proofs now because I've learned the language well enough to piece things together. However it was the fun, the absurd, and the playfulness of the completely impractical that kept me going. Games, thought experiments, what-ifs. That sort of stuff.