I think my daughter felt the same way about school. She went into kindergarten already reading and for a while she seemed to like school. She got awards for reading and math in elementary school. Teachers liked her. I heard only good things about her in elementary.
Then it all changed in middle school. School was boring. She hated math and didn't know why she needed to learn what she was being taught. She didn't like the way the teachers taught. She became a cheerleader. Academics wasn't important. I got phone calls from her teachers who told me she was a smart girl but she wasn't paying attention in class because she was spending too much time socializing. She went to a community college for a while but couldn't stand living where we live so she moved to Dallas at 19 and worked her way up into jobs that allowed her to live the lifestyle she wanted. She could afford to travel and live in a nice apartment. The really good job she has now required that she pass an employment test. She said it had a lot of math on it, including some algebra, and it was timed. She made a higher score than most of the other applicants who had earned college degrees. She got the job. Some of the people with college degrees didn't. She was glad that she had learned a lot of math at her previous job as an office manager for a small furniture company. She had to use a lot of math on that job. In high school she had no way of knowing what she would be doing five or ten years later. She didn't "plan" to work at any of the jobs she had as a young adult, she just took the best jobs she could find and learned as much as she could learn on those jobs. In my experience and hers there is just so much of life that cannot be planned so it is best to learn as much as you can possibly learn while you have the chance even if it is boring and even if it doesn't seem like you will ever use it. I am so glad that she is able to share her life experiences with her little brother. She is able to give him really good advice because of her experiences.
My 13-year-old son hates geometry and that is what he has been working on lately. We homeschool and I let him put off learning some of it the last few years. He took several months off from doing any math because he has to wear a painful brace all day, every day, and now in addition to dealing with that kind of pain he is doing three math lessons a day to catch up so he can be finished by June. So when you are thinking about the pain it is causing you, just know that it could be worse.
By the way, as a homeschool mom I am having to relearn math that I haven't done in a very long time and I have a son who is not satisfied with knowing how it is done, he wants to understand why. I was never taught why. I am too tired and too stressed to even try to figure out why, but he usually figures it out on his own while he is figuring out alternate ways of solving problems so that he can answer questions doing less writing than I have to do to get the same answer. He has dysgraphia, which is another pain.
We have learned to just push through the pain. If we can do it, so can you. It is worth it.
