You know, I hated math when I was in college. Well, I guess that's not really fair. It was just so much work, and sitting in lecture halls with 200 (or more) students and a seemingly disengaged professor studying material that isn't all that intuitive, well that's not exactly a process designed to make you love something.

Then add in grade pressure. I was on an ROTC scholarship and it was imperative that I get very good marks. I got the GPA I needed, but I didn't learn to love or even appreciate math.

I did learn to love math, though. In my early 40s! I had a friend with a PhD in applied mathematics who had just retired from the petroleum industry and was bored enough to want to try something crazy.

He started a math club for adults at a local library. He offered to tutor university level mathematics for people who wanted to learn it just for fun. No grades, no pressure, and no mandatory timetable for completing things.

I had an absolute blast. I went all the way through about calculus 3 with him, with detours into the mathematics of infinities and a few other esoteric subjects he was interested in, and I realized that I had hated math in college because I never understood it.

As far as I ever got back then was learning certain formulas well enough to plug in and power my way through problem sets. By the sweat of my brow and a little panic. LOL

But when the pressure got turned off and I got to take as much time as I needed to really understand what I was doing, the whole process turn joyful, because it was so much fun.

I don't know if that sort of thing can ever be duplicated at universities, because of practical considerations, but it's a shame that the way we teach math often turns people off to it, when it's actually really fun if you do it right.