My experience of maths in high school was being taught a trick or method to solve a really specific type of problem every week. Sometimes the method would build off something we'd learnt the previous week.

The whole thing was bottom-up learning where you get given piecemeal nuggets of information but never see the big picture. They completely lost me at around the age of 15. I eventually came back to maths later in life after studying formal logic in my philosophy undergrad degree.

I guess I was one of the lucky few who learned this in elementary school. And later again.