""And we mathematicians wonder why so many people view our beautiful subject with distaste bordering on hostility."
Yep...still have bad memories of Mr. Bigalow for high school geometry trying to stuff my mathematically empty head with theoroms and postulates, etc.
However, when I got to college I had a wonderful woman professor who we called "Dr. Marie"...I had her for "Mathimatical Statistics" ...she was an outstanding instructor and her's was the only math class I took in all of my academic history that made any sense at all. (I got an "A") (Also learned a ton about playing "Keno" using statistics).
I have bad memories of college freshman Algebra. The prof would chicken scratch the first few variables on the board, get sidetracked, and leave us to wonder what the heck came next. Students, young and old, were dropping the class like flies. Those who didn't bail out before the cut off date merely signed their names to the final and turned it in blank. Two things got me through the course with a B: 1) I'd already complained to the head of the department and 2) I was dating the prof's pet who was a math whiz.