I remember hating math from late primary school to all through high school. I never learned my times tables properly. They were just absolutely boring AF. What I didn't realize at the time though was that I basically set myself up for failure. When the basic building blocks are hard, everything else on top gets unnecessarily hard.

I remember reading Lockhart's Mathematician's Lament and loving it. I discovered that I actually liked math when I was able to let go of the "there is only one way to do things" and realize that math, in a sense, is 'made up but logically consistent' (notwithstanding the arguments about whether math is innate to the universe or invented by man, which I err more on the innate side -- I'm thinking of a slightly different concept here).

When I learn something, I always need to know the why. We were never taught that in school. "Just because" has never been a good enough answer for me in anything I want to learn. Learning about the history of the problems, why certain solutions came up as solutions and why they were needed in the first place made everything much more concrete for me.

I've been using ChatGPT over the last month or so to re-learn my times tables and basic arithmetic from the ground up. I had no idea what 'automaticity' was (I never developed it; I still would manually count simple multiplications in my head or on my fingers). I had never made the connection between algebra and arithmetic -- at least not deeply. In that you can manipulate arithmetic expressions just the same as algebraic ones if you want (72 - 37, you mean I can subtract 2 from both sides first to make the calculation easier?!?!).

Now I'm motivated though, because I know why I'm learning it. I can look at it with my adult brain. I guess it's a bit like the difference between a kid being forced to take piano lessons and an adult that's really motivated to learn and practice because they suddenly discover they want to play.

Oh and 3Blue1Brown is amazing!