quadratic functional mess

I never realised how rusty these brains were till the daughter brought out her Add Maths books and asked me to help her with some problems.

And to think it was one of my favorite subjects and one of my strongest. Functions? Inverse functions? Roots? Point of roots? Sum of roots? Quadratic equations? And this is only chapter 2...

I suppose the fact that I can solve 5 out of 7 problems means I ain't that bad eh? But it takes a lot of flipping the pages, reading and understanding the examples (ever noticed how the examples in the books are always the easiest of the lot & the actual exercises are nowhere related to the examples), switching between the text book and the reference book & the evergreen 'checking the answers at the back'. And that takes like what, half an hour..

It's frustrating enough for me and I can really feel for the daughter when it all seems nothing but just a fuzzy blur.

And I have come to the conclusion that all Add Maths teachers are just loose in the head. They are faster than the speeding bullet. Some of my classmates in secondary school can attest to our Form 4 AM teacher who sped from one end of the board to the other in a matter of minutes without even bothering if we understood what she was blabbering about. Needless to say the whole Fourth Form failed the AM paper in the first semester. It may have been her proudest moment yet. Funnily, I cannot remember her name for the life of me.

Then in Form 5, we had Miss Ambrose. Another one we simply could not understand. What was she saying neither what she was teaching. Thanks to an infamous tutor at that time (getting into his class was like getting into Yale, we had to sit for bloody exams), we managed to buck up and pass with flying colors. But the case of Lembu Punya Susu, Sapi Dapat Nama - Ms Ambrose was praised for our performance (from zero to hero).

The tutor itself was/is (heard he's still tormenting the kids) another nut job. He'd give us loads and loads of homework and expect it to be turned it the next day. Half the time in school, we'd be doing his work. Good thing was, the reference book used in school & tuition were the same. So we started the 'copy & paste' well ahead of time. Just not with the click of a mouse though...

So anyways, I am desperately begging the daughter to take up tutorials for AM 'cos its only Chapter 2 and I want to throw out the book from the 16th floor.

Parents, if you think the last you saw a text book was when you left school or university or whatever it last was, think again. It's deja vu all over again when them kids head off to school. I suppose if we were to take the PMR or SPM papers again we would be so lucky to get off at a 'B'. Seriously, these kids are being tortured. But really is there any solution to this?