Just for context: I'm Russian, it all might be different in your part of the world. Anything education-related was hard for me exactly because of the pervasive "you can only use your head" mindset. You have to use formulas from memory. You have to do everything from memory, except maybe the teacher would write some constants on the blackboard. If you're lucky. In some classes in school (physics iirc?) we were allowed to use a calculator, but for math you definitely had to only make do with pen and paper. I easily grasp how stuff works, but this whole memorizing the exact intricacies or risk failing the test/exam is what gets me every dang time.