It's nice to see that I'm not alone in this situation.
I completely ignored math during high school due to a number of reasons (bad influences, even worse teachers...). I then went to college and managed to pass through calculus classes, mostly thanks to pure mechanical memorization and professors turning a blind eye to my lack of understanding.
Since my graduation (~5 years ago) I've been trying to fill this gap, but like you perfectly described, all materials expect you to have a solid basis. I think the problem is that math is huge and people spend a good chunk of their lives learning it (4-17 for the fundamentals alone!), so we fail to see how much it involves and how hard is for somebody that didn't have a proper education to learn it.
I have been making solid (although slow) progress with https://www.khanacademy.org/. I tried to learn from the top a bunch of times, but always hit a wall and dropped it. I only started moving forward when I decided to go through the basics, algebra and trigonometry 101. It has been a hard and slow journey, but each step comes faster and becomes more rewarding.
I completely ignored math during high school due to a number of reasons (bad influences, even worse teachers...). I then went to college and managed to pass through calculus classes, mostly thanks to pure mechanical memorization and professors turning a blind eye to my lack of understanding.
Since my graduation (~5 years ago) I've been trying to fill this gap, but like you perfectly described, all materials expect you to have a solid basis. I think the problem is that math is huge and people spend a good chunk of their lives learning it (4-17 for the fundamentals alone!), so we fail to see how much it involves and how hard is for somebody that didn't have a proper education to learn it.
I have been making solid (although slow) progress with https://www.khanacademy.org/. I tried to learn from the top a bunch of times, but always hit a wall and dropped it. I only started moving forward when I decided to go through the basics, algebra and trigonometry 101. It has been a hard and slow journey, but each step comes faster and becomes more rewarding.