First off, I love math. It's awesome. I've always loved it, and it was always my best subject. But let's be honest: It is BORING. I don't sit around doing

First off, I love math. It's awesome. I've always loved it, and it was always my best subject. But let's be honest: It is BORING. I don't sit around doing math things in my head when I could be doing anything else. Okay, occasionally I'll find some interesting math thing and play with it, or find a (real life) word problem and decide to solve it. But other than that, it's so amazingly boring. Learning math is even more boring. So why don't kids like math? Because it's boring! I don't blame them. Some people are blaming the teachers, or the education system, or blah blah blah. Okay, maybe they -could- be doing things better, but has anyone ever done their job perfectly? I've yet to meet that person. Instead, they're doing their best, just like everyone else. I started learning Japanese a few years ago. What I didn't expect to learn was how many different ways there are to learn a new language. And the best way isn't any single one of them... It's to combine a bunch of them together. And not a particular set, either. You should combine all the ones that work best -for you-. Having learned just exactly how complicated it is to make the perfect set of lessons for a single person, I looked around and saw how differently everyone learned. It's not only impossible to create a perfect set for 1 person, it's impossible to create a good set that matches everyone. The best you can do is catch the people who don't learn well on their own and hope the rest will teach themselves. So then I look at our system, and I'm not surprised that I see that's exactly what they're doing. They're trying to catch the stragglers and leaving the brightest to fend for themselves. And they can. I did. But had I -known- that was happening, I'd have forced my education to go differently. My girlfriend is homeschooling her son for various reasons, but chief among them was that he hated school. He was bored and picked on, and yet still getting bad grades. She made him a promise that if he brought his grades up to a certain level, she'd homeschool him the next year. Unsurprisingly, he easily hit that level. It's been going great for them. She has accelerated everything to the point that he is constantly learning, and he gets top marks on everything. Then, because there's free time, he gets a little vacation to have fun for a while, then back to work the next semester. They also go beyond the required instruction and do projects based on the material. I can't think of anything better to create lasting memories than that. tl;dr - Our system is fundamentally flawed.