It sounds like your math teacher was a lousy teacher if he says something like that to a young student. The problem may not have been your problem. It may have been a teacher problem.

I remember growing up, I was never all that good at doing blue collar kind of work. I had a really hard time figuring out how to do it well. Then in 1999, I had to find a way to pay for my college tuition. Working in fast food over the summer wouldn’t pay the bills, so I took a job as a tree planter. Tree planting was the dirtiest, grungiest, most blue collar kind of job I ever did in my life. Training for it was hard. I was out in the middle of nowhere trying to figure out how to plant trees properly, and quickly to make money (they paid you on commission) and it was a slow go at first. It took me far longer to understand how to plant than most of the others on my crew. After 4 weeks of making lousy money, I finally had a good day and planted 800 trees in a day. After that, it was pretty well all uphill for me.

The lesson I learned that summer was I could learn how to do almost anything as long as I stick with it, and have a good teacher that would help me learn, even if I wasn’t naturally gifted at it.