>The teachers, for the love of God, simply could not teach and were indulging themselves on a whiteboard.

At the university level, I found math professors to be the worst instructors I encountered, without a doubt. Was your experience the same?

The first time I took Calc 3, the professor would say "Now anyone can look at the example in the book on their own and work through it. I'm going to put a little twist on it to show you another concept."

The premise of this is fine, but execution was awful. He would then on-the-fly decide what variables he was going to change and start writing on the chalkboard. After filling all 3 sections, he'd erase and fill the first and second sections. That was ~40 minutes into the 50 minute class. Then something wouldn't look right as he studied the 3/5 of the problem still on the board. The class would finish, and sometimes he'd spend the first 5-10 minutes of the next class showing where he messed up and completing the example. My 5 pages of notes were of no value because somewhere they were very wrong.

Had he taken 15 minutes to work it out on his own ahead of class, I might not have dropped the class. The next time I took it, I had a lecturer who was really amazing and I earned a A. That was the only A from the math department I earned in college across 4 difference classes and 5 instructors.

> I found math professors to be the worst instructors I encountered, without a doubt

Same. If this weren't common I think memes like "this is left as exercise to the reader" wouldn't exist.

I'm convinced most of them find math intuitive to a point where they can't indentify at all with people who struggle with it and have no idea where to even start explaining things. And it also takes patience to try and bridge that gap. Not to mention a lot of maths concepts depend on understanding other ones and education in general just assumes that each person is proficient in everything from previous classes.

It's similar with technology as well, some people know immediately how to rule out problems or google a solution while others struggle to come up with the right question.

The problem is simple: The kind of person who can understand Calc 3 enough to teach it, cannot possibly know what it is like to be the average student in the Calc 3 class who don't magically just "get" it like someone who became a math professor definitely did.

Teaching is a really difficult skill that most people are not born with. If you can easily understand high level math, you usually aren't going to decide to spend your life teaching, rather than making good money.

The best math professor I ever had in college was an adjunct from the local community college, because they were a teacher first, and a mathematician second.

had a similar experience where i got frustrated out of maths when i had to switch to study it in three different regions, each using different notations and terms for the same thing.

once you are off the train it is hard to self-motivate to get back on. the university lecturers i learnt from do not seem to have any incentive to help you get back up to speed.