Trigonometry. My high school math teacher was a literal math genius and would always go deep into proofs and theory, sometimes not even getting to our homework stuff until the last 5 minutes of our 50 minute class. As a result I went from the "gifted" math group to nearly failing.

When I went to college I had to take a math placement test and ended up in Math 99 (below college level math).

It was there I was finally taught SohCahToa and everything clicked. I actually use simple trig a lot in my job now.

[–] Vince@lemmy.world 14 points 6 months ago

Interesting, I had an almost opposite experience. I was good enough with memorization and applying formulas in high school to pass with As but I never really understood what I was doing.

Taking calc again in college and watching a video of Neil Degrass Tyson talk about Newton figuring out orbits are conical sections made everything click for me. Suddenly I remembered the 3D episode of the Simpsons and those coin spinny things at the mall and put it all together.

After that, I was much more interested in figuring out how the formulas worked and it made learning way easier.

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