Perhaps what would help all students is to explain that the things they start studying in jr high school and high school can have a direct bearing on how much money and how successful they are later. Yes, I know education is about more than just the money, but life without any money in the US quite frankly sucks.

Had I known that, I might have passed my math classes in junior high instead of wasting all my time in open rebellion. I didn't pass them because my teenage theory was that if I was the best behaved and compliant in class, the school didn't have any right to tell me what to do with my out of school hours. Like asking me to do homework.

O' course when I went to college I had to pay to take the same classes I had blown off. Topping the class in trigonometry was really satisfying.

And one last thought- I first got off track in math when presented with geometry. To me, spatial relations had nothing whatsover to do with numbers and equations.