It's a sad problem. I remember I hated math since the first year I went to school, and the only reason I know anything now is that at one point I decided that writing computer games is more interesting than doing math homework - and somehow, magically, math became interesting and worth learning in my free time.<p>(I remember that when I was 16, we took an exam between secondary and high school. After the exam we were exchanging solutions to exam problems; I remember people talking about how they solved one task by using Pythagorean theorem, and me thinking "wtf? What Pythagorean theorem? I used the formula for distance between vectors in 2D space".)<p>So now, many years later, I sometimes work as a tutor and I completely understand when high school students tell me that math is useless and physics is boring. Both subjects are so completely destroyed in school that it's sad too look. I remember conversations about Michelson–Morley experiment, for example. Yes, <i>it is useless</i> and boring when taught in school, to be memorized for upcoming test. But it's much more interesting if one sees it as an important part of a great story - a story of our struggle to understand what the light really is, about two competing theories that were finally unified in a seemingly bizarre way, paving way for crazy science that gave us Internet, iPhones and lolcats.