No, no... it Pains me to see Math seen like this.
The problem with the current maths education system is its founded by people who've never done real math in their lives. Starting from primary school.
Generally people who don't understand math, or suck at it, become primary school teachers (how many primary school teachers have even done a 2U maths course?), and they then teach the next generation their failure of an understanding on the subject. Then the kids, grow up, inhereting the same idea about maths as their primary school teacher (who first exposed them to it), and thus they too become primary school teachers due to their failure to grasp math. The academic cycle of mathematical failure, and because one teacher has many students, this problem is only going to get worse, the failure at maths is quite literally expanding at an exponential rate.
Math in the real world, is NEVER a set of problems with single solutions, like you see in textbook. Hell maths isn't even "IF john had a fence of 20 meters what's the biggest area he could make" (John can figure that out well enough for himself, without some 14 year old telling him he needs to get out a piece of paper and write some x's and y's).
What you learn in school are "special" and "common" cases of applications of mathematics, something like 5% of the entire mathematics world. What you learn in school is like, take for example the subject art.
Art is (im no artist) basically applying your creativity onto a page with whatever paint, to depict whatever you want. But where does it start? It starts in kindergarten where you have a picture with sections divided into numbers 1, 2, 3. Where each number represents a color, and your job is to color all the 1 bits green, all the 2 bits blue..etc, sure it can be rewarding now, that you have a pretty "WELL DONE" sticker on your page, but doing this for 12 years or more can be .... boring....
ALL of primary school, high school, and a good bit of university is the mathematical equivalent of this color in activity. Its awfully limited, and feels like your just following instructions over and over.
But take heart, real math is not this, and if you are failing this kind of "math" in school, YOU ARE NOT 'bad' at mathematics in any way, you are bad at being a computer, but that's what computers are for aren't they? Real math is basically "the science of patterns". Real math doesn't happen on pieces of paper with symphonies of X's and integral signs. Real math happens in a persons head, real math is basically thinking of an "idea" of how to find a quantity. The symbols and other stuff are just expressing your idea in an elitist way.
