My problem (in this example) isn't understanding, it's memorization. I can understand the concepts. But I have to not only understand the different concepts, I have to understand how they are used, I have to memorize a unique word for each of the three concepts, and I have to remember which word is which concept. It's actually four different mental activities, all of which need to be embedded in my long-term memory, and all for a thing I'll almost never use. Yes, people use mnemonics. But then I have to memorize the mnemonic and what it means, which adds a fifth activity to all this. To add more difficulty, each of these things needs a visual/spacial representation. So I need five different mental activities in five different spatial representations to remember and explain trig ratios.
And this is why it took 8 hours for me to do math homework every night.
