When you first start teaching math you quickly learn that some things that seemed simple or inconsequential to you are massive stumbling blocks for large numbers of students.
Factoring quadratics is one of these things.
Most people I encountered while majoring in math did not have a "method" to factor quadratics. You look at the thing, see if you can think of some factors, if you can't use the quadratic formula.
Students HATE this "process" it took me a long time to understand why. 1/
