Kind of a thread jack / off topic. But, have you looked into a montessori school? It introduces children into learning in a fun way and adapts to tasks and styles of learnign that the child enjoys.
While we're offtopic, here's an anecdote. I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, and certainly the singular isn't, but...
When I was a kid, my parents put me in a private Montessori school because I was bored out of my skull with a regular school. Less than two years later, we changed to homeschooling. I was literally coming home every day crying because I was so miserable. I don't know if the school actually followed Montessori principles, but they claimed to and it was horrible. It was literally just like the traditional school system, but with "hands on" activities and ten times the busywork. The last straw was when they tried to get me to do a science project that involved dropping parachutes from a second-story balcony three hundred times for "accuracy".
There are, however, irrational--indeed, transcendental--numbers that follow a discernible decimal pattern, like the Liouville constant.
Sorry to reply to myself, but here's another link you should look at. The first story in there describes exactly why finally blocks should never be used as a poor man's transactions system.
In nicer languages than C that have exceptions, you often also have try...finally blocks, where you can guarantee that your cleanup code will be called, even if you call some function which calls exit(). Essentially, it gives you nice atomic/transactional operations, at every level of code you want them at.
At least in Java, System.exit() calls the shutdown hooks and then kills every thread without mercy. To quote the excellent book Java Puzzlers, which had this as one of its puzzles: "the presence of a finally clause does not give a thread special permission to continue executing". In fact, you can read this this puzzle in the sample chapter on their website.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." -- Isaac Asimov
