Enthusiasm for a subject

If a parent wants their child to be the next Carol Vorderman, or a similar whizz at maths, then they need to make their child enthusiastic for the subject. People’s minds differ, and their interests differ. Because of the way their minds work, some find one subject easy and another difficult, whereas a different person will have the opposite experience. Much of this is not inherent in the workings of the individual’s brain, but comes from the way they happen to interpret the subject that they are learning. My eldest daughter was daunted by the subject because she thought that to add, she had to remember all the combinations of numbers and what their sum was, and she we intelligent enough to realise that there were an infinite number of numbers and that this was impossible. So she gave up… after all, why try and attempt the impossible? (I have sympathy with this outlook, because, when at the age of 11, I started learning French, I gave up before I started due to what I perceived as the impossibly huge task of learning and remembering all the words of the vocabulary that I knew in English). I was able to help my daughter through this difficulty, but it still put her off maths, and she has underachieved in this field ever since as a consequence. Had she not be put off the subject, then she could have achieved well at it. From these experiencesI learnt that creating enthusiasm for a subject is the main attribute to success in it. When you’re enthusiastic and interested in something, doing that thing is not work.