I was very bright when I was young, but unless I was given practical application of knowledge, it just leaked out of my ear.

I was exactly the same with trigonometry, I couldn't understand it or why were even learning it.

As soon as I started to get into programming and I wanted to have a gun with a bullet that had a certain speed, and it was going at a certain angle, and I needed to break down the horizontal and vertical components of the motion, all of a sudden it felt like I had invented trigonometry myself.

I found that true of so many different things especially with math. No matter how much it was explain to me theoretically, it never made sense until I had a practical application and then it was just obvious to me.

I wish more of my education was that way instead of just learning theory.

Interesting, I had an almost opposite experience. I was good enough with memorization and applying formulas in high school to pass with As but I never really understood what I was doing.

Taking calc again in college and watching a video of Neil Degrass Tyson talk about Newton figuring out orbits are conical sections made everything click for me. Suddenly I remembered the 3D episode of the Simpsons and those coin spinny things at the mall and put it all together.

After that, I was much more interested in figuring out how the formulas worked and it made learning way easier.

I had something similar except I actually got help in high school from a study hall teacher. I can't remember her name but she had awful halitosis. Somehow, she just explained it in a way that clicked for me.

Interested to hear more about SohCahToa, my only terrible subject was Math, or more specifically, Algebra.