[xzins]

My wife is a high school math teacher (geo, trig, pre-cal, cal). Her favorite saying is "math is NOT a spectator sport."

In math, as you know, before you go to step 2, it is necessary to understand step 1. (You can slide around a subjective class ....put Longfellow before Poe, or teach the Civil War before the Roman Empire. It really doesn't matter.)

But she can predict student grades simply on the basis of who does the homework. You gotta keep up.

[Taxguy]

Both my parents (and Grandmother) taught math at the JC level; my mother also taught at the HS level. My father was an enginnering major and my mother was a math and education major. From experience, my mother knows more math and is the better teacher; I had her for freshman alegebra. I later took calculus in college and she was the one who had help me; my father had not used his math skills for several years and no longer remembered enough to teach effectively. In the JC, my mother taught the higher level courses and he taught the more basis one.