My school experience made me not care about math as much as I wish I did. Or rather, nobody &quot;made&quot; me not care as much as I wish I did. That was my fault. It&#x27;s more like when I started school in my country of birth math was _forced_ on us and we _had_ to be good at it. When we moved countries this was no longer the case and I allowed myself to fall into math-mediocrity.<p>I did my first few years of school in Ukraine, where the importance of math was drilled into us regularly. My grandmother was a retired teacher and insisted on us learning our multiplication tables before we started first grade. My mom absolutely loved math and drilled its importance into us. At school math seemed like one of the most important subjects. We&#x27;d get a lot of homework in all subjects, but my most concrete memory of homework was sitting sometimes for hours in my room at home solving math problems.<p>In 1999 we moved to the US. School was very hard, but mostly because of the language barrier. I excelled at Math because a) it was something I didn&#x27;t have to know much English for and b) it seems like for the first few years the things we were taught in Math class in the US were things we had already learned in class in Ukraine. Aside from the other kids laughing at my &quot;weird&quot; way to do long division on the board I was really good at it. The thing is - I wasn&#x27;t good at it because I was enthusiastic about math at that point, just because we were going over stuff I had already learned in Ukraine.<p>As I started middle school I was still ahead of everyone for a couple of years, but eventually our US schooling caught up with our Ukrainian schooling. Suddenly we weren&#x27;t going over stuff I already knew anymore, and our teachers didn&#x27;t seem to drill math into us as much as they did in Ukraine on the whole. My grandmother was no longer there to insist that we practice aggressively and my parents kind of adopted a more Americanized attitude as well, I think.<p>By the time I graduated high school (by that time in Australia), I was &quot;ok&quot; at math - maybe a little above average. But I wasn&#x27;t excited about it and didn&#x27;t go out of my way to really internalise the concepts we were going over in class.<p>I now regret this deeply. I had the perfect opportunity to learn, both with that original approach from Ukraine and parents who were _very good_ at math. But I fell into complacency when importance of math wasn&#x27;t pushed onto us as much anymore and didn&#x27;t learn as much as I wish I did. I think I would be a much stronger programmer today if I had, and now I&#x27;m considering taking some sort of math course independently to get better.