of the mathematical circles in the Bay Area exposed me to a quotation about learning mathematics: "Mathematics must be written into the mind, not read into it. 'No head for mathematics' nearly always means 'Will not use a pencil.'" Arthur Latham Baker, Elements of Solid Geometry (1894), page ix.
A series of FAQ files on mathematics learning for the Epsilon Camp summer program
Complain about the archaic teaching methods if you will, but having trawled through substantially similar texts in the past (some writing styles truly haven't changed in centuries), I'm quite sure that this stuff improves both reading comprehension and spatial imagination.
To focus your mind on a small piece of symbolic or verbal-mathematical information for a great length of time is difficult, but very rewarding. It's something that we don't get very often in the modern world. Even in programming (which is probably the fastest method of turning a mathematical entity into something 'real') we often have to switch between countless different tasks in order to solve just one nontrivial problem.
(That's from about 4 centuries after Euclid. It would really help to have manuscripts from Euclid's time -- for example, it's suspected others added the definitions later and perhaps injected a neopythagorean POV not in the original.)
http://www.geometer.org/index.html
of the mathematical circles in the Bay Area exposed me to a quotation about learning mathematics: "Mathematics must be written into the mind, not read into it. 'No head for mathematics' nearly always means 'Will not use a pencil.'" Arthur Latham Baker, Elements of Solid Geometry (1894), page ix.
A series of FAQ files on mathematics learning for the Epsilon Camp summer program
http://www.epsiloncamp.org/FAQ.php
expand on some of the same ideas.