One more thought about the below.

I did fail that class, but eventually I learned to pass math classes by great effort. Essentially, because I have a very good to great memory, I learned to memorize a huge number of problems so I could kind-of almost see some relation to a problem and a vague guess to similarity was often enough to allow me to recall a problem (of my catalog of hundreds to thousands memorized) so that I could work out the one on the test exactly the same as the one I’d memorized step by step.

Needless to say, this required just herculean effort and means I didn’t understand anything at all.

Essentially, I was (without knowing it) applying AI techniques in a human mind to math problems — that is, I was “solving” them without understanding anything about them. Not the numbers, symbols, what should happen next or why. I had no idea.

All I know was I found a problem in my rote brain catalog and made the same transformations for no known reason.

I became a robot to do robotic things. I never understood a single thing I did or worked out in any math class — not once, ever.

Here’s how terrible I am at math.

Once, in high school, I got a 6 out of 100 on a math test.

Yeah, a 6.

I’ll never forget that as the teacher told me it’s the lowest grade she’d ever seen for a student who appeared to be trying their hardest and actually attempting to learn.

The thing is, though, I could never find any method despite hours and hours of studying to determine which particular algebraic technique to apply to any problem, nor could I ever discern any possible criteria for determining this, even in principle.

Obviously, there must be ones, because some students (including a close friend of mine) made a 100 on the test.

Math always has and ever will look like a language that I cannot read, and when I think I begin to understand it a bit, it shifts to another dialect or alphabet, and then I am again lost.