It&#x27;s just one anecdote, but this jibes with my personal experience.  I hated algebra (high school algebra) because it was endless tedious, mechanical manipulations and there didn&#x27;t seem to be any real elegance or beauty to it. It was just memorizing &quot;stuff&quot; like the quadratic formula, how to rationalize denominators, blah, blah, blah.   But high-school geometry was actually <i>interesting</i>.  Seeing how the various proofs were formed and built up from pieces, and how one thing followed logically from another, that was <i>fun</i>.<p>Needless to say, my geometry grade was much better than my algebra grade.<p>Then, in college, taking pre-calc&#x2F;Trig, it was back to a lot of boring repetition (except trig, that was actually interesting).  But then in Calc I, it was fun again. The <i>idea</i> behind derivatives was actually interesting, and hooked me early on in Calc I.<p>Anyway, I always found that, other than tedium, the biggest challenge I had with math was being put off by cryptic notation.  I tend to want to read things to myself in my head as I look at them on a page, and when I&#x27;m looking at (new&#x2F;unfamiliar) math notation, and I don&#x27;t know how to &quot;pronounce&quot; it to myself, my mind wants to just blank out and skip it.