Learning algebra in my 60s
It's a shame he went to all the trouble of avoiding conventional education (for the wrong reasons), but then still ended up going down an execution rather than concept focused route. As soon as you start memorizing operations and treating math more like a narrow grind only approached through arbitrary problems solved primarily through computation or use of rote application of poorly understood technique, you lose the ability to understand math as anything other than a human attempting to be a computer.The author expresses his misintuition of variables - there are plenty of simple examples and thought exercises which can inform the intuition. Later he expresses getting mixed up dealing with fractions - this is a clear demonstration that a fundamental understanding of fractions was skipped in order to grind out solutions. Modern math education is spectacularly guilty of going too far too fast.Fundamental understanding gives exponential results yet most courses try and get the axioms and basics out of the way as fast as possible, working through basic proofs or derivations is cute sideshow, if anything. If the fundamentals are well understood, the applications feel trivial, intuitive, beautiful, clever - when the fundamentals are taken for granted, one word describes the relationship to the rest of the material: arbitrary.