Complicated?

Math is one of those subjects where I feel like everyone either hates it, or loves it. And the ones that love it seem to be few.

When I arrived in Peru again a month ago, I started helping three students here with their schoolwork/homework. The oldest one I am helping is a homeschool student studying geometry, the middle one is in 8th grade, and the youngest is in 4th grade. All three of them have really struggled in math. Some of that is a result of online schooling during the pandemic, and some of it I believe has to do with how much of education here is 'task based' (which I will write about another time). But there was an interaction I had with the oldest student that I think demonstrates one of the biggest problems most people have with math in general.

I met this student through a mutual contact that suggested I might be able to help him with his geometry studies. He is actually studying using a homeschool series from the US which is broken down into several different smaller books. When I started working with him, I asked what his goals were and basically he just needed to complete the books. We spent the first few days going through the theorems and postulates that were listed in each lesson, and ended up completing the second book within a week. I asked him at the end of the week if he felt like he was understanding what we were working on, and he said that he did. Then he told me something that really made me think. He told me that he had been working on this course for about a year and a half already with other tutors he worked with here in Peru. I was somewhat floored by the thought of that. He had been working for a year and a half and had only made it through one book. We made it through a book in a week. How could that be? So, I asked him what the difference was between the way I was working with him and the way he had been working on it before. He told me that all of the others went through each small statement and spent almost a full class on it proving it 'with numbers'. And basically each time he got to the checkups they seemed extremely difficult. In contrast, I took what needed to be done and narrowed it down to the simplest terms to complete the work. He not only was getting through the coursework quicker, he understood what was going on as we did so. He even started to see the proofs we were working on as something that wasn't so bad.

All of this made me wonder, how often do we make things more complicated than they really need to be? My own personal history with math involves a period where I thought I was incapable of doing math at all. In taking a fresh look at it again as an adult, I have realized that much of what I didn't understand or couldn't do was very similar to my geometry student's problems. What I was working with really was actually much simpler than I was led to believe. Is it possible that we are overcomplicating things that really aren't that complicated at heart?

What was your experience with math, or even school in general?