American kids are taught to hate math at an early age. The educators make it as painful and tedious as possible while not showing any practical purpose for any of it. When the students hit high school, they're only required to take two math classes. After being taught for 10 years that it's boring crap with no purpose, most of them take Algebra 1 and Basic Geometry freshmen and sophomore year, do the minimum effort to pull a C, then brain-dump it and never look back.
I did a 'brain dump' of geometry forty years ago and haven't regretted it for a moment. What a waste of classroom time. Algebra at least had minimal use so I used it.