It's a sad fact that teachers are often not very good. This often has to do with the fact that they do not know what you already know, and proscribe inappropria

It's a sad fact that teachers are often not very good. This often has to do with the fact that they do not know what you already know, and proscribe inappropriate things for you to try next. You struggled in school, it seems, because you had a teacher very focused on proofs and you never learned proofs. This is a common problem I find in mathematics, where someone never learned one key element, and struggles to pin down why everything is so difficult for them. For many people, it can be calculus, or linear algebra, or bayeseian statistics, or fourier transforms, to name a few topics myself and people I know have had aha moments in when they finally learned.