Interesting, I had an almost opposite experience. I was good enough with memorization and applying formulas in high school to pass with As but I never really understood what I was doing.

Taking calc again in college and watching a video of Neil Degrass Tyson talk about Newton figuring out orbits are conical sections made everything click for me. Suddenly I remembered the 3D episode of the Simpsons and those coin spinny things at the mall and put it all together.

After that, I was much more interested in figuring out how the formulas worked and it made learning way easier.