Not the OP, but I've had good and bad math teachers. The bad ones tend to teach rote steps, "do this, do this, do this, done," without any attempt to explain why things work the way they do, without drawing parallels to already-learned things, without trying to teach any _why_.

Then you hear students asking, "when am I ever going to use this?"

My good teachers, on the other hand, always tied what we were doing into a larger scheme. If there were similarities or other relations between concepts, they'd be pointed out. If someone wasn't 'getting it', they had other ways of looking at it at hand, would sometimes give alternate methods of doing the same thing, etc.

In short, one tells you to memorize in a vacuum for no good reason. The other helps you learn.