"If your son (or anyone) understands variables, assignment and adding them together, they fundamentally understand Algebra." This seems like it should be so, b

"If your son (or anyone) understands variables, assignment and adding them together, they fundamentally understand Algebra." This seems like it should be so, but real world experience tells me it is not. Understanding how someone can understand one and not the other is beyond me, but its exceptionally common and a huge stumbling block for me to teach people programming. The fact that we are usually writing relations in algebra, but instruction statements in programming is really quite significant, even if they look similar.