"Math professor" probably means at the college or university level -- high school math is widely regarded as complete and utter BS.

I've taken... a rather significant pile of maths classes at this point (I'm majoring in it), and I've never felt like any of the college-level maths classes assigned busywork. I may not have liked the size of the workload (oh god, real analysis), but I've never felt it was unreasonable.