Yes, I do learn. I've realized that when I was typing up the last post I made on this thread. I do learn, but the more complex and demanding the task, it seems, the longer it takes me to figure it out and be comfortable doing it.

As a kid, I struggled heavily with math. My father, who had majored in math in college, had taken it upon himself to try and tutor me and help improve my grades. I recall that I was getting B's in that subject in grade school and my dad wanted to improve upon that. Well, turns out that he lacks the patience and understanding to be an effective teacher. He never could grasp the concept that there are people who struggle with even the most basic parts of math. In his mind, that should be second nature to anyone.

Oh, the yelling and crying that would go on. He'd get frustrated and yell "WHAT PART DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?!" at me, and I would sob and yell back to him "I DON'T KNOW!!!" It would go on like this until either he would get to the point where he couldn't deal with it anymore and walk away, or my mom would intervene and try to help somehow.

As a result of this "tutoring" of his, I never gained the confidence I needed to learn math and to this day, just doing a basic Algebra problem draws back the negative associations I had as a child.

I don't really feel it's my parents fault, that they were poor parents. Mom often says that she would do things differently if she could redo having us. Unfortunately, stubbornness was a big issue, on both my part and theirs. I don't want to place blame on anyone, that it was just a result of a series of situations that could have been handled differently, but weren't.

With my dad's anger management issues, and my mother dealing with trying to please her oppressive parents and make them happy over herself and us kids, I feel my upbringing was a product of circumstance, if anything.