When did you receive your education? I, too, grew up in the Midwest but my experience has always been "shut up and calculate" rife with mostly process-learning

When did you receive your education? I, too, grew up in the Midwest but my experience has always been "shut up and calculate" rife with mostly process-learning and unrelatable problem sets. Certainly important, yes, but also boring. Nothing creative, nothing playful, just very mechanical, very dull. Word problems were infrequent, and anything with real world application was jammed into the margins and given only the most cursory glance. Not to mention doing the online homework was awful.