Facepalm

That’s terrible. You really deserved better. I was very fortunate as a child that my father actually did math problems with me on my bedroom whiteboard before bedtime stories as a little kid.

And yeah the further you get into math the more science not only is explained by it but the more science makes it make sense. Calculus was a nightmare until I took physics and suddenly I could tie these abstract concepts and numbers to phenomena I’ve experienced my whole life, and with that more generalized understanding math gave I could extend it further and to less intuitive things.

A lot of people are really bad at teaching math. For some people it just clicks and they often struggle to understand why it isn’t easy for everyone. And a lot of people learn to dread it, when it’s definitely something many people have an uncomfortable history with, but it’s really not scary, it just takes thinking a bit differently. It also doesn’t help that a lot of people, especially from older generations, were taught math by memorization instead of by investigation. And a lot of teachers below the high school level (and even many math teachers there) don’t really get why they’re teaching what they’re teaching and have a general dread of it. Rules and properties seem simple and pointless when you learn them because they’re easy to demonstrate there, but as you go further suddenly it does start to matter things like how you can move numbers without changing the answer. But for someone who more likely wanted to be teaching children things like reading and writing and probably took algebra if that in college they didn’t really understand why things they need to teach need to be taught, and they may not understand why they need to teach things like number sense.

One other great tool is visual representations. Small candies like m&ms are the classic example, but basically moving things around in accordance to equations is an effective tool for building a sense of arithmetic and a baseline understanding of how real numbers work (real numbers just means numbers that you can actually have that many of a thing). And fractions while scary to many people are just a division problem you decided not to do