Rearranging equations

At the weekend, I was speaking to an ex-student. He is a man of 54 who runs a company selling fresh donuts from vans. However, he wants to study Marine Engineering, but to do so he needs to have an A level in Physics. As a result he enrolled on a Physics course at his local further education college. As a temporary teacher, I only taught him for one term, so on meeting him again, I asked about is progress. He told me that he was OK with the Physics side of things, but that he shed marks in the exams because of his maths. He has a particular blind spot for rearranging equations. He admitted to me that to rearrange an equation he had gone online and asked Google to find a website that would do it for him. This story shows the tragedy of so much of maths education in this country. Here is a man, who is no fool. He is commercially successful, but beyond simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division maths has remained a mystery to him, and now is providing a block preventing him doing the things he wants to do.
It is not as though rearranging equations is difficult. So often maths teachers make it so, when explaining their way through the process. It is almost as though the teacher has achieved an understanding of the arcane routine, and subconsciously wishes to make it as difficult as they can for others to do so, so that these others may experience a similar sense of achievement when they break through and understand how it works. At Puppet Maths we have no time for such silliness. We are here to make maths easy. The whole point of our using puppets to demonstrate the mechanisms of mathematical computation is to provide images that are easy to interpret and memorable.