I came here to say this. In fact, I want to add, in my case, I think the institution of education ruined math for me.
Although, unlike you, I don't think I ever recovered.
Although, unlike you, I don't think I ever recovered.
Mistakenly, my impression of how to learn maths was based around the ideas of learning how to calculate new idea X and then spending hour upon hour of rote exercises.
One day I had an epiphany, being a computer programmer it dawned on me that I should not be doing all these calculations by hand, only enough to get the basic idea.
Since then I have only bought undergraduate or graduate text books, and used sage for learning math, its just thousands of times better as I now get to learn the real concepts and not just rules (or put another way where axioms do appear I now understand _why_ they are formulated).
Also the other thing that has long lacked in my early math teaching was that in no way were we taught anything about the art of creating and reading proofs, I think this is a shame as it deprives people from the interesting mental rigour that is required to accomplish this.
I think the average high school mathematics syllabus is being devised by the criminally insane. Personally I am a great believer in the work of these folk http://www.computerbasedmath.org/