I moved around a lot as a kid between Canada and the US, and attended at least ten different schools until my parents finally settled down in Mobile, AL. The standards between these two countries are incredibly different, especially when it comes to math. The use of the metric system in daily practice is just one difference that has a rather obviously large impact on the way people think and learn. Needless to say, I didn’t have a great experience with it.

I ended up dropping out of college, and later learning Trig for a job site I was on, in which I had to work daily with blueprints for a 119' diameter power plant scrubber tank. I would learn something cool, apply it at work the next day, save the engineering team hours of work, and get promoted straight to a senior QC supervisor, just from learning the math I needed on the job. It actually made sense at that point since I was actually using it for something and not doing some contrived examples that my teachers barely even understood themselves. I’ve been studying Calculus for machine learning purposes over the last couple of years, and I’ll get that down also.

I wholeheartedly agree that the way mathematics is taught in this country could use a serious upgrade. It’s not that great of a system to begin with, and then on top of that it completely fails on edge cases such as myself where I didn’t have a problem learning it, I had a problem learning it at the limited and dumbed-down rate that I was being forced to learn at. One size does not fit all, and everyone has a different way of learning things.