Roundup from reader emails:

—Many homeschoolers recommend the Saxon series of textbooks, which apparently (I have never looked into

them) emphsize rote drills and grunt work over fancy colored charts and multi-culti flim-flam.

—There is a dire shortage of decent math teachers, mainly due to the market-denying philosophy of the big teacher unions, who have unilaterally repealed the law of supply and demand. Their next project: repealing the Law of Gravitation.

—Immigration (groan). Math is hard, and the current approach to hard tasks is, to find foreigners willing to do them for low wages, while we get busy with **real** American careers — lawyer, doctor, movie star, Professor of Media Studies, drug dealer, etc. (The “quant” section at the investment bank I worked for up to 2001 — that is, the floor where dwelt the math whiz-kids who devised the firm’s very complex trading, pricing, and risk management strategies — was known on the trading floor as “Chinatown.”) Awareness of this seeps down to kids much faster than you’d think, and by the time they hit teen age, American kids have already got the idea that math is something done by people with funny accents and bad haircuts, for low wages. They seek career opportunities elsewhere.