Thank you for taking the time to write it out! Funnily enough I'm not too bad at math (I tapped out at around linear algebra level) but I was taught in a very rigid way. Useful concepts like commutativity were just... read out loud to kids to be remembered as a Law Of Nature, instead of allowing kids to play with numbers and develop our numbers intuition. So while I have a decent theoretical knowledge, I'm terrible at applying what I know to real life. If that makes any sense?