Generally my advice would be to go back to the most basic set of skills you can identify that she doesn't understand and work up from there - including having h

Generally my advice would be to go back to the most basic set of skills you can identify that she doesn't understand and work up from there - including having her construct formula to solve problems (preferably ones that she finds interesting.) Though, honestly, if she doesn't want to learn maths she's not going to learn maths. If you're really concerned for her and she doesn't want to do something, then you're probably best off just teaching her the tricks and cheats so that she can get a good result and then forgetting about the whole thing - it's not like maths is likely to be a particularly important aspect of her life. # With respect to pi in specific - > Instead of giving her the c=πd formula she wanted so badly, I wanted her to understand that π represented the amount of times the diameter "fits" into the circumference and that this is the relation between the parts of the circle. If she's never constructed formula to solve problems for herself, she many not know that you can do anything with that sort of information. It's not a trivial step if you don't already know what = and * and / and so on really do to go from any particular instance to c = pidiam. > I measured as accurately as possible the perimeter and diameter of the mouth of a cup I had and showed her that dividing the numbers produced approximately pi. This unfortunately didn't provide the "ohhh" response I was looking for, which signified that she didn't intuitively understand division. Try cutting up an apple or counting little blocks or something like that. If she doesn't understand division then trying to use division in any capacity with relation to more complex problems is a waste of time. > "The circumference of the glass divided by the diameter gave me pi, what does that mean?" I thought you werne't just giving her the formula? If she were able to substitute letters in she'd have it. =p Really though. It doesn't mean* anything beyond that pi is the circumference over the diameter. You need other knowledge to network it into before it becomes meaningful.