I agree. I think the bad thing about history courses, though they interest me in the short-term and are easy for me, is that it's nothing more than a learn & dump method of learning. Our requirement for western civilization consisted of three semesters worth of material, and I did well in each course...but I remember only a few key things, vaguely, from each of the three classes. It's just nothing something that you use very often. Unfortunately math has just always been a pretty hard thing for me and thus I've shyed away from it, where I've excelled at writing and those sorts of classes. Math (especially mental math) is something that I intend to slowly improve at though.
Yeah, I'd probably be the same way. In fact, I'm the same way with math too. As I mentioned before, though, you can reconstruct your understanding of a subject given a very small hint, so you don't need to remember very much to be able to make use of most of what you learned in a math course. I suppose you could say knowledge is much more hierarchical in maths than it is in other subjects.
I was never bad at math, but I wasn't good at it until I began liking it. I think seeing some of the wackier applications is what drew my interest.
This is a bit of an aside, but my philosophy professor briefly mentioned Gödel's incompleteness theorems today in class (which, in essence, show that given a sufficiently powerful mathematical system, there are things that are true within the system, but cannot be shown to be true). He phrased it as something like "Gödel proved that there are some things that you can't prove to be true." I think about 50 heads exploded.
