I was the top math student in my school every year of my life, and I always hated math, and I even still shy away from it when I can. I do educational research

I was the top math student in my school every year of my life, and I always hated math, and I even still shy away from it when I can. I do educational research now (engineering/science/history education - but yeah I still shy away from research on math education). The reason I believe is because kids aren't taught why math is relevant or useful to them. For example I still remember in first grade, we got handed a big book of math problems and had to go through them all over the course of the year. It was so boring, I raced to finish it as soon as I could. I remember racing with other students in fourth grade, too, to see who could finish tests the fastest. That probably did have a role in my math abilities improving. There have been studies of having kids 'race' through math problems really fast so that they learn to do it more automatically, and this is apparently common practice in China if I recall. This may help learning math, but it doesn't help and possibly hurts interest & motivation to learn math. And studies have shown that interest and motivation are what correlate the most with our career choices, not test scores or abilities. Finally, yes, there are solutions already out there that teach math in a way that makes it relevant and more interesting to students - they just haven't spread all over yet. The Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) project out of the Netherlands is very old, and there have been similar efforts since then. They are basically theoretically grounded in what is known as situated cognition. All cognition/learning is tied to the context. Jean Lave for example showed how some Brazilian street children had developed very sophisticated math skills on the streets. Some less depressing contexts for learning math skills might be in the grocery store, or in creating a game or other software app (which is how I came to finally see the uses of differential equations and matrices and trigonometry and the like after college - creating educational software applications). John Dewey knew about this 100 years ago. He said we shouldn't educate students for the future (which is uncertain and unimportant to kids), but instead educate them for today. How is what you are teaching them useful to them right now, in their own lives, not the lives of adults or professionals. "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."