Word problems: Designed to see if you can recognize numbers in a contrived short story and plug them into the rote-learned algorithm that the teacher just covered. Fun. It seems like if we taught the application alongside the math, it'd be easier to "get" what the math is supposed to represent.

I've been playing with computer graphics recently; I've understood trig for a long time, but this is the first time I've actually felt a need to understand matrices. Exploring applications on my own is the only way that I've really felt connected to math since maybe late grade school or early high school.