This. I went from 50s and 60s to high 90s in my last 2 years of high school math because we were getting taught wave functions and real science math finally and all you need to know there is how to figure out which formula to use and which numbers to plug in. I’m terrible at basic arithmetic but crush algebra and later got good at food math by necessity. Also just finding ways to not count as much helped. Like when doing catering we would store plates in basically giant poker chip sets on wheels. People used to stack em in randomly until I finally figured out the closest multiple of 10 you could get to in a stack before going over the top. It was 70 plates and each dolly or whatever had 4 slots for stacks, so if all was in place each was 280 which made getting the plates ready for events way quicker cause people didn’t have to manually count them, just use your 7 times table and then count the remainder to add or subtract. Once I figured out that you don’t necessarily NEED the math you learn in school but if you remember to use it, it can really fucking speed things up. Also all math should be represented as algebra from the start, instead of 2+2= and leaving a blank space phase it as 2+2=x and solve for x. I think more complex algebra wouldn’t scare kids as much if they knew they were kinda doing it all along.
Elementary school had us using tokens for math constantly and it made it way harder for me. Especially cause ‘showing our work’ meant basically drawing the lil tokens on paper that were either black or white I think black represented a minus and white represented a plus (on paper, they were red and yellow irl). So I ended out doing the equation different and then reverse engineering the method they wanted from me.