When teaching elementary math, I discovered that I like arithmetic. Unfortunately, arithmetic makes so much sense to me that I have a hard time relating to Sparkle when she doesn't understand it. If I were a better teacher I'd be able to coach her so that she doesn't hate math. Unfortunately, as an inexperienced teacher, in addition (pun!) to teaching Sparkle arithmetic, I also ended up teaching Sparkle to hate math.
Sparkle looks for patterns when it doesn't make sense to look for them. For example, I shuffle a deck of flashcards so they should be in random order. She looks for patterns from one card to the next.
On the other hand, she doesn't see patterns when they would be amazingly helpful. For example, there was a column of math problems today. She dug through each problem in isolation. She eventually plowed her way through, but it would have been so much easier if she realized (or let me point out) that she could use the answer from the previous problem to easily find out the answer to the next problem.
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