[tcmart14]

No expert either, but I can speak as a non-traditional student (didn't go to college right out of high school join the Navy and started a family first) about to graduate with a degree in engineering. I was decent in math in grade school but did not like it. I didn't learn to actually enjoy math until my college calculus classes. And it goes back to the real math you are referring to. Looking back, Algebra in highschool just felt like, "memorize this type of problem and the steps," but didn't do anything to build intuition in actually understanding the why. Then calculus comes and I felt like that gave me the 'why.'