I am all about having fun playing with numbers. I did have students like you. It could be a real effort sometimes to get them on the right path. But the reasons I wanted you on that path was because I was trying to teach you shortcuts to make doing The Math^tm^ easier.

If you are a kid sitting in my math class I will tell you that you already learned everything you needed to know about algebra, (geometry is something different and sometimes more wild and fun), when you learned how to add and subtract. Everything else you were being taught was just a short cut to make the maths faster and easier to do. So it's important to learn those shortcuts. Hey, mathematicians are nothing if not lazy. And we all want to be lazy mathematicians right?

I was also a little bit less concerned about getting the answer right than I was interested in teaching you to understand how you got that answer. Explain to me what steps did you take to get to the answer. If you can do that, that becomes an important skill in getting the right answer far more often than you will get a wrong answer.

And finally, and a point where I did cross into the world of "The English Teacher", insert your native language here please. Neat penmanship counts in math. It makes going back and seeing what you've done far, far easier. Boys, as a very general rule, struggle with this a lot. Not that girls can't also, they do. And as a member of the Bar Sinister, writing ain't meant for lefties - The Struggle is Real. But keeping your math writing in neat columns and rows goes a very long ways to making math so much easier. Once I could get those boys to slow down and be neat and orderly, they would often be amazed at just how good they actually were with math and how easy it became. They could often quickly elevate themselves from being a struggling D student to a B or even an A student just on hand writing alone.

So remember Kiddies, You can't blow things up until you learn the math!