Exactly! Proofs are why I love mathematics so much. There's nothing quite like the great "ah-ha!" moment when you find that one leap of logic that topples the rest of the dominoes in a proof. Of course, I understand that some people are better at teaching proofs by involving students in the discovery. Maybe the parent commenter was taught proofs in that same rote manner. I've had professors that have done that, and it's like someone sucked all the fun and learning out of the subject.

From the preface of Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines by Marvin L Minsky:

> The reader is therefore enjoined not to turn too easily to the solutions; not unless a needed idea has not come for a day or so. Every such concession has a price—loss of the experience obtained by solving a new kind of problem. Besides, even if reading the solutions were enough to acquire the ability to solve such problems (which it is not), one rarely finds a set of ideas which are at once so elegant and so accessible to workers who have not had to climb over a large set of mathematical prerequisites. Hence it is an unusually good field for practice in training oneself to formalize ideas and evaluate and compare different formalization techniques.