At a guess, you tolerated number crunching but couldn't stand word problems?I think that's the way most people - including most teachers are about Arithmetic. I was just the other way around - I barely tolerated the number crunching but I enjoyed the word problems. So I didn't do that great in elementary school Arithmetic - but ended up getting an engineering degree.
Actually, I kind of liked the word problems, I just didn’t like going through the effort of showing the work. Geometry really annoyed me, I kept telling the teacher that most of the proofs were easily solved with a ruler