In my experience, this is literally true.

A math professor I knew was asked this question by a student…

Professor: You use it to make the atomic bomb.
Student: HOW do you use it to make the atomic bomb.
Professor: That’s classified!

1. You must be exposed to as much as possible and tried and tested in it, so that we may as much as possible catch the fire in those who can be interested in each aspect of knowledge.

2. You must be exposed to as much as possible so that you come out with some lingering notion of what humanity has accomplished, and be aware of as much as possible so that you can look up information or seek help from the right sources later.

3. You must be exposed to as much as possible so that you have some idea of the scale and glory of the human achievement, the possibility that you might someday have something to offer through using it in your life, your duty to preserve it, or to take any chance to add to it.

4. You must be brought to understand the scale of your own ignorance compared to the total of what humanity has learned and thought.

I never did as well in math as in word-based subjects, and certainly was not going to do math at university level. I can come to no real conclusion as to whether that is a matter of humans having innate tendencies toward or abilities with math, or is purely a matter of instruction method. I lean hard toward the former, since so many other things about a person’s abilities seems to have a major hereditary component, and even tendencies and interests in subjects seem to resist shaping.

But I’m open to instruction based arguments. I instinctively question them in other areas, but with math I’m not so sure.

I am unconvinced any method would have made be more inclined to it, but comments on an earlier post made me wonder. I tended to 70s in math or sometimes less, where I made 80s-90s elsewhere.

I don’t quite get the problem with the basic symbols of arithmetic notation or see why one would need to change them, especially to a purely brackets based system. That seems more confusing. I see more of a problem when it comes to order of operations, though in the end it just seems like a hierarchy one would have to accept and internalize, since one would be needed, and I’m not sure standard notation fails unless someone will here point out that it becomes hopeless in trig or calculus. Or is relevant. It never seemed a problem in HS algebra.

One thing I dimly remember from junior grades was having difficulty internalizing the system for doing subtraction on paper. Addition, easy peasy. Multiplication too.

Division was interesting. Somehow I got taught a method for short division first, then struggled when they wanted to make us use long division, then struggled anew later when they wanted us to use short division. No idea whether that was old math versus new, or just a skewed curriculum unsure what to teach first.

All basic stuff, but I’m not sure whether the method or notation was the problem, or just me.

One thing for sure, I could be taken as far as algebra in 12th grade, but no farther, and I could not solve those equations today.

If there’s something in education that could make math more intuitive than that for the likes of me, then I’d listen even now.