[ksdale]

This is exactly my experience! I breezed through math all the way until I got to calculus because I was excellent at rote memorization. Calculus made me realize that I didn't really understand most of what I had learned for the past several years.

Years later, I'm trying to relearn math, but I'm taking the exact opposite approach. No calculator, no rote memorization, just reading about the concepts and thinking about what they mean until I can do the manipulations in my head. When I do practice problems, I don't care so much about the specific numbers, but about my ability to understand what's happening to each part of an equation, what the graph looks like, etc.