On Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:35:36 -0400, Warp wrote:

> They completely reject the notion.
> It's like they had some kind of fear or phobia, and they like to hide
> behind their "I'm not good at math" defense. Any explanations or
> attempts at teaching will fall to deaf ears. Heaven forbid that they
> ever actually learn math!

The funny thing is that many of these people are very good at doing 
math.  My mom, for example, has always claimed to be a slow reader and 
poor at math.  She has two primary hobbies (one of which she uses as a 
source for income):  Cooking and sewing.  With sewing, she takes patterns 
and scales them to sizes that the pattern doesn't include (up or down) - 
doing fairly complex calculations without even thinking about it to 
resize an odd shape (or more often two or more odd shapes) properly so 
they can be sewn together in a way that it will actually work.  
Similarly, she can scale a recipe properly in her head for however many 
guests are eating.  It's quite amazing to watch - and then she sits down 
to do the taxes, and just gets completely frustrated at all the numbers.

I think it is some sort of a block.

Jim

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