Reply #53: Maybe it's not your daughter's intelligence that's the problem here.

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It sounds like you're biased against her interests--thinking that literature is not much more than what teachers "read into things." Sounds to me like your daughter has math phobia--most likely due to bad teachers. There may be other reasons why your daughter's eyes are glazing over--why rush to assume that she's "one of those literary people" who just can't get it?

Mathematics is often taught poorly, and it's been proven over and again for decades now that math teachers are biased towards male students: case in point, the president of Harvard citing innate math inabilities in women. Because math is pure abstraction, and we live in a market economy, math teachers try to point out the 'reason' for studying higher math: you can be an engineer or a computer programmer. Wow! That's a real turn-on to someone interested in literature and history! Maybe your daughter sees no reason to study math just like you see no reason to search for literary symbolism. (And by the way, considering that there was an entire movement of "Symbolist Poetry" you might be surprised how often the author actually does intend for the symbol to be there.)

I had no interest in any of the practical applications teachers cited as the reason to study math. I was a female student interested in literature, politics, and philosophy. What could philosophy have to do with math!? The fact that this question was left unanswered for me shows the poverty of education in this country.

I hated math. Now I'm studying Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory as an adult, in part because of new paths in continental philosophy as well as--gasp--symbolic structures in Latin American literature.

You might want to hire a tutor. Someone who can explain math in terms even a lit geek can understand.