and for newer generations: yes teach, i will always have a calculator in my pocket, so fuck you very much.
I will never understand the insistence on making people memorize things before they know if they'll ever have a use for it, we live in an age where you can just look things up within seconds and there is a whole profession which is specifically built around copying from others (programming).
People are capable of memorizing things that come up a lot, there's no need to pre-emptively memorize when we have computers and the internet.
I always thought of it as more of a "give me something interesting to do and I'll apply myself person". I did great in science because we were always doing experiments and shit. Math not so much because it was just here's how to do X. Now lose an hour of your free time doing that 80 times. Fuck that.
It does not help that most teachers don't know how to make math relevant and interesting because at some level they don't think it is either. And even if you actually do find math to be interesting, school more or less beats that out of you.
I remember when we were learning about negative numbers I got it intuitively and was able to do all the problems right away. The teacher asked me to explain what I was doing and when I did he scolded me in front of everyone for not explaining it the way he did. I had said something like "the negative and positive cancel each other out" and whatever you're left with is the answer. I don't even remember what the "proper" explanation was but that's always worked for me. I had a ton of moments like that with shitty math teachers over the last 4-5 years of grade school it really made me hate the subject. My 8th grade teacher hated me so much that she recommended me for the remedial math class in high school even though I was never having problems learning anything in her class I just didn't do the obscene amount of homework she gave me. High school was better but I was a year behind everyone else because of that. The only plus to it was she also recommended like all the hot girls for that so I was in math classes with them for most of highschool.
Same both from the school system and my mum. It's led to a large chip on my shoulder and a very nuanced ego and lack thereof at the same time. I am making almost 200k a year and still a large part of me feels like a failure thanks to a childhood that didn't recognize my challenges.