When did you start realizing that you and math were never going to get along?

I learned quickly when I was in the Army how important math was. I got along great with it since.

Zack!
...I actually had the opposite experience...math in high school was horrible, I thought I was hopeless...

Then took a required college algebra course as a freshman in jr. college, loved it, made all kinds of sense; then (voluntarily) took on calculus, aced it, then differential equations...for me, it was the quality of teaching, a huge difference!

When asked what this was.

Oh gosh... you are my hero! I despise maths with a passion.. I am utterly garbage at it, as are my kids... it's pure torture!  I failed my UK O'level in maths and it's haunted me ever since...  to such an extent that I am considering taking a slightly lesser maths qualification in May/June but I am dreading it.. as i seriously hate maths and suck at it... 

But to answer your question.. I knew when I was 8 .. and the teacher asked me what 3 x 7 was .. and I didn't know.. she was SO nasty and rude.. insulting as hell.. and said, in front of the class that I could have 3 weeks to learn what 3 x 7 was... ok I DID learn it.. 21.. and never forgot it.. but a) that was sooooo humiliating and b) i never did learn my times table and have hated maths ever since...

My dad f**ked it up for me. I was around 8 years old. His way of teaching was to hit me in the face every time I got an answer wrong and I got a lot of answers wrong. I've been going downhill ever since.

I never had problems with math until I hit Differential equations in college. Very difficult but kinda fun,too.

For me, it wasn't math. It was long ass novels. What a drag!

When I had to take algebra in middle school.

Get a ruler in your hands. Measure things until you start to understand how a ruler works. Measure some stuff and figure out where the center is. Say you measure a book and it's 7/8" thick. You look at your ruler and see that every eighth is divided into two sixteenths, so obviously half of 7/8" is going to be 7/16". If you write that out you have 1/2 x 7/8 = 7/16. And you notice that 1/2 is divided into 2/4 and then into 4/8 and so on, so you can convert anything to anything by multiplying all the numbers on top and then all the numbers on bottom.

Other rulers are divided into 10 and 100 parts. But an inch is still an inch, so anything on one ruler can be translated to the other ruler. A half inch on one ruler is 5/10 or 50/100 on the other. An eighth inch is just 12.5 marks when you have 100 marks per inch. A metric ruler divides an inch into 25.4 parts, so a half inch would be 12.7 of those parts. Pretty simple, isn't it? Practice this a bit and people will think you went to wizard school.

Percent is simply a ruler with 100 marks. The only confusion is trying to keep track of what the marks represent, since that changes from time to time.

ive always known that

It wasn't until I reached my wit's end and became completely frustrated with calculus and trig that at last it clicked. Then it all started to make sense when I just noticed it in things.

Transcendental Number Theory was a little tricky.

I think  was grade 3 or four when long division came into play .... My teacher used to let me , Jen and and girl named Brandi sing girls just want have fun with Pom poms at end of day if we stayed quiet during  class ... That makes no sense prob's but  true  story..... Meh , math. :) yes dance at end of class with Pom poms! Math ....is ....AWESOME :) I'm not normal ... That's fine 

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PIb6AZdTr-A

When I got almost a perfect grade in Trigonometry, but failed horribly on a standardized math placement test. Either my grades were lying or I was just stupid. I really can only understand enough to pass a test, then I will forget it immediately. Or maybe it is when I realized I can barely add or substract in my head. Now the medicines have made me stupid, and I function in a fog most of the time.

When I was in fifth grade, I come from a family of math lovers, my Papa, my brothers are excellent in math, my mom she can calculate faster than a calculator...I'm proof .....because I saw the jeweler struggling with the sum and my mom simply told him the total, he was flabbergasted....I'm the black sheep in my family, I always was inclined to arts....drawing, poetry, anything creative...I would do.....but math....NO;)) This post was edited by Veena.K at April 12, 2017 3:44 PM MDT

Senior in High School. I had both Trigonometry and Physics. I thought I was going to be an engineer until then. I still enjoy math, I have my own business and do my own accounting and taxes.

Long before I started to learn, or at least be taught, Maths - so when still Arithmetic.

I staggered through the local-authority grammar-school and left with a very low GCE O[rdinary] Level 2nd-attempt pass in Maths, whose syllabus included Trigonometry, Calculus, Mensuration, Euclidean Geometry, and obviously, Algebra.

(I say "obviously" because you cannot study mathematics without algebra, the language of mathematics just as plain numbers form the language of arithmetic.)

Les obviously perhaps, the UK education system does not break Maths into separate curriculum subjects, as the US system appears to do. Mathematics as a whole is a single part of the curricula, and each mathematical topic - algebra, trig, etc - is within the Maths syllabi.    

My own school, in the mid-1960s, also ran a curious side-line I think was really a pilot for much greater changes subsequently, called the 'School Mathematics Project' (SMP). This rather snootily called anything not in its own syllabus "Traditional Mathematics" - ignoring what we pupils then could not have known and were never told, that actually, the "traditional" maths was used every day in science, commerce and industry! And still is, of course - only we were taught anything as more than exam subjects, little or nowt to do with everyday life.

SMP included Transform Geometry, Solid Geometry by way of making cardboard polyhedra, Venn Diagrams not proposed by their inventor (John Venn) as a mathematical tool, and intriguingly, Binary and Octal Arithmetic. The last two reflected the growth of Computers - at the time, very large organisations were buying these enormous installations from firms like IBM, and you had to understand programming, based on Binary digits and 8-Bit words, to use them! 

Supposedly very intelligent but slow to learn generally, unable to grasp abstract concepts, and suffering from a variety of Maths teachers from good to poor, I had little chance.

About 20 years ago I took as a refresher, the new version of school maths: GCSE. This was a lot simpler than GCE, with no calculus, but did have one topic so abstract and divorced from real life or other maths topics I failed utterly to understand it: Matrices. Matrix principles go back  centuries but one of their main 19C developers was Prof. Charles Dodgson , of Oxford University. I thought that appropriate, for under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, he wrote the children's two Alice fantasies!  

I've a friend far more highly educated than me, a university lecturer in operating-theatre nursing, who claims she too struggles with mathematics. She told me, "Maths is all squiggles, and I don't do squiggles'. Well, surgery is squidgy bits, and I'm too squeamish to "do" squidgy bits!