I’ve always been good at basic math (up to and including highschool ball-park algebra) on an intuitive level, to a degree that was so wildly unhelpful and didn’t align at all with my schooling experience. Did extremely well in elementary and most middle school math, but in 8th grade algebra is where it really started to cause issues. We’d have a new concept shown in the form of equations and I’d always arrive at an answer by just plugging in numbers and solving it in my head until I honed in on the right answer (essentially just brute-forcing a correct answer).

Of course this didn’t work in that class, because the teacher wanted me to “show my work”, and wouldn’t accept an answer of “I just did it in my head” or “I looked for an answer in my head and found it”. I eventually learned what “show your work” really meant (show the step by step algebraic process that the teacher wants you to do), but I pick up on that until long after I’d given up on highschool (I was forced to retake algebra in 9th grade, and then put into a lower math class in 10th, and by that point, I just stopped going to math class entirely).

Fun fact, I got suspended from school a couple times for skipping class. The process was basically this:

1. Skip class

2. Be assigned detention for skipping class

3. Skip class again when they were going to tell me I had detention

4. Skip detention that I was never informed of

5. Assigned, but never informed of, double detention

6. Skip detention that I was still never informed of

7. Suspended from school (still never informed of)

8. Have a teacher see me on campus and tell me I’m suspended and need to leave school grounds (which is the first I heard of any of it)

School system at its finest, y’all. Skip class enough and they punish you by saying you’re not allowed to go to class.