I actually hit this personally, because right up UNTIL calculus, math was the Feynman method for me. Everything always just clicked, made perfect sense, and I saw the beauty in it, and it was great fun.
Then for calculus, we learned concepts, like what a derivative is, and I understood that, and understood conceptually (as in, what everything "means" and what it tells you) but I could never take that concept knowledge to the practice problems with me.
I could follow along as the professor walked us through a problem, showing us what heuristics helped and what patterns to follow and how to manipulate the functions to get to something that followed one of the patterns to pull an answer out of your ass, but I could never commute those heuristics and patterns to novel examples. It's weird because I was great at doing the exact same thing for physics: Taking a novel and purposely opaque problem and finding which pattern it corresponds to.
Then for calculus, we learned concepts, like what a derivative is, and I understood that, and understood conceptually (as in, what everything "means" and what it tells you) but I could never take that concept knowledge to the practice problems with me.
I could follow along as the professor walked us through a problem, showing us what heuristics helped and what patterns to follow and how to manipulate the functions to get to something that followed one of the patterns to pull an answer out of your ass, but I could never commute those heuristics and patterns to novel examples. It's weird because I was great at doing the exact same thing for physics: Taking a novel and purposely opaque problem and finding which pattern it corresponds to.