I never necessarily 'liked' math. I was the one scribbling down the homework at the last minute to turn in. I was fortunate though that I understood easily even then and that has translated now later in life to be able to approach problems much easier.
For instance, a page from a paper I referenced when writing a MATLAB program last semester to solve for stress distributions in carbon fiber composite layups:
Now without a fundamental knowledge of matrices, which I learned in the
9th grade, I would have had a pretty rough time understanding how to implement that into my code (well, not so much the code, but the hand calculations to go with it). It's amazing how those little things from early in school come back to play grabass ten years later.
Of course not everyone needs to know the complex stuff but understanding the fundamentals makes whatever you do later in life much easier.
I'd feel much better knowing that the 24 year old nurse at the hospital passed high school algebra when she's doing the math on how much of a certain drug to inject into my ass..... :-)