But don't you wonder, ACS, if you would eventually have gotten past that in an environment where it was "manditory?" I do.
I am not convinced. I believe that the approach you describe was used with one of my siblings and resulted in a LOT of screaming and, ultimately, despair and, finally, dropping out.
Lessons learned by parents and school resulted in a kinder and gentler approach for me.
The thing is that none of us have had any problem getting things precisely right if we believe that it matters. When calculating something that we need to know to make something or perform some task for work or home, there has never any problem--the attention to detail problem only emerges when we are presented with a problem for the problems sake. We do not even like to solve puzzles, only real world problems that we are actually facing.