I’ve been tempted to pick up an adjunct section of algebra at a local community college and invert the usual style of teaching and start with word problems. A lot of people have an intuitive sense of how to figure out, say, how to scale a recipe but when it gets turned into symbolic math it becomes a challenge for them. I’d kind of like to take advantage of that and start from the word problem and then move to how to turn that into symbols so that instead of thinking y = 1.4x-2.8 we'd say think in terms of you pay $1.40 for each donut but the first two are free. If all the x² and x³ have particular meanings, you’re less like to think that x²+x³ = x⁵ but recognize that you can’t simplify the expression until you know what x is.