I truly think I am, but I'm still struggling to learn Haskell...
>the abundance of poor pedagogy is surely a big reason why so many people develop mathematical anxiety.
I'm one of them, but 28 years later, I'm finally realizing that mathematics actually aren't that hard.
>The programming world lately is inundated with tutorials that take their pedagogical style from the Teletubbies or at best Bob Ross. Maybe that is not a viable way of teaching Haskell.
I think you hit the nail on the head, here, and I would like to hazard the following opinion: this is a deeply cultural problem in the United States, where we operate under the implicit belief that learning should be fun.
I don't mean to suggest that learning isn't rewarding, deeply satisfying, and occasionally exhilarating, but beyond learning your ABCs, it's rarely fun in the traditional sense. The problem, as I see it, is that we're failing tell the truth: learning non-trivial things is tedious, grueling, difficult, and tooth-grindingly frustrating while still being one of the most worthwhile things in life. Instead, we try to teach difficult or non-obvious concepts with the pedagogical equivalent of coloring books.
Stated differently, we simultaneously tell our youth that one has to "work hard" and "make sacrifices" for things like sports, while telling them that intellectual pursuits should be nothing less than blissfully entertaining.
As a general rule, I avoid anything labeled as being "for beginners", unless it's from a foreign editor. I'm lucky to be a fluent speaker of French, and I've noticed that French textbooks systematically approach subject matters in a rigorous, Cartesian, matter-of-fact way ... and this from grade 1!
You want to know how I finally grokked monads? I read this paper: http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2846&c...
It sucked. I mean it was awful. I spent weeks pouring over this thing, fighting the kind of frustration I described above.
And I got a D+ in undegraduate pre-calculus. I'm not a "math guy", but like everybody else, coloring books don't cut it after you start growing armpit hair. Big-boy concepts require big-boy methods.