I remain glad I teach maths and not a humanities (or commerce!) subject. Your problem is that once you had students who *could* read and write. I've never had students (barring those occasional cases, but they're statistical outliers) who could string a maths argument together, and, quite frankly, nor could I in 1st year. You've been spoiled, that's all :) I never learned to have any optimism in that line.