I enjoy doing recreational linguistics , writhing poems , stories and argumentative texts , yet I always sucked at humanities at school . I learned a lot of what school tried to teach me on my own , often after failing to fully grasp it at school . On the flip side , a lot of time was spent learning about things I still do not know the use of , that I , with some difficulty , crammed for tests and forgotten .

Even with maths which I am quite good at , I often entered new topics with some knowledge of them from doing maths recreationally , which was not that great for me , both as I did not have enough resources to find the gaps in my knowledge and as I spent time not building on the knowledge I already had .

I think this is an issue of how little we focus on individuals in our schools , though this is not something I blame teachers for , to be clear , they have no option to do so , especially as being a teacher not rewarded enough , ignoring both the extra workload outside of school and with generally shitty pay .

I often find that the best way for me to learn is via exploration , trying to do something and researching ways how to do things needed to reach the goal . This is unfortunately something school doesn't have space for and I suspect it is one of the factors behind this misunderstanding .

The reason I feel like maths gets more heat for not having a use is because its harder to convey meaning of abstract equations , as someone else in this thread put better then I can , many students , I feel like , miss a deeper understanding , being left with only what is needed to pass the test , forgetting even that soon after ...