My high school algebra/trig teacher was a real drone; every problem had to be done by rote and she cared more about your handwriting and placing the numbers the

My high school algebra/trig teacher was a real drone; every problem had to be done by rote and she cared more about your handwriting and placing the numbers the same way she did than whether you actually knew what you were doing. She had the imagination of a four-function calculator; to her it "math" meant "mechanical". I made C's and D's in her classes, because I'd see shortcuts that got the right answers faster but she'd mark right answers wrong if we didn't use her methods to get them. Meanwhile I was writing my own 3-d graphics engine at home, working all the math out from observation of the real world with yardsticks and using graph paper, because I didn't have internet at home to look up the answers or the math education to know . Every time I'd try to ask her if anything from algebra or trig connected in some way to what I was doing, or if she knew of some math tools that would help me, she'd shut my questioning down and belittle me. I actually worked out sine/cosine and rotation matrices out on my own before we covered them in class, because she wouldn't point anything out to me. To this day I still don't know if she was such an unimaginative rock that she really didn't make any cognitive connection between math and real world applications, or if she just hated me for being a nonconformist.