Also I'm not sure what you mean by "back", is it referring to what we iirc called story exercises in Dutch primary school ("Jan goes to the store and buys seven ladders, then sells three..." etc.) or was this a thing a few hundred years ago or so?
And I don't really understand the "I didn't do math and Greek in School". I barely had a foreign language, but if you're actually learning the concept you memorize the letter as well. You can't understand what a wave function is and then not remember that its symbol is Psi. And if you don't know what a wave function is, it won't help to write derivate_2nd_order(waveFunction, time).
EDIT: obviously we're not talking about stories to teach newcomers, you're talking about writing equations in scientific articles and books with words.
Sure this is the "state of the art", but despite the fact that pure language notations might be even worse, i cant help to think that people thinking like the parent might find something even better.
Maybe something inspired by braille notation or something that is invented while trying to understand how our brain works (just speculating here) will be even more expressive.
I actually like seeing an adult be bothered by the fact that the same symbols that turn science more expressive are also the reason that there's a big ladder for newcomers to understand whats being expressed given its all very arbitrary (someone in the XVI century choose a random greek letter to represent X).
Imagine how much science would improve with more "brain power" being also able to try to solve some problems given there are less arbitrarity..
... that's why I said "I'm not proposing to turn everything into English prose. Rather, using (abbreviated) names for variables"
Actually, that might be a good exercise: try doing some moderately abstract equations with variable names such as you'd write in a programming language and you'll find yourself shortening them pretty quickly. We literally do it sometimes when modeling an equation for a new domain: we start by writing words and at the end of the blackboard they already became a symbol.
Using symbols reduces the amount of text your brain has to parse. It makes it much easier to reach consensus on a shared understanding of things. The price to pay is to learn this new notation or language.
Chinese people learn dozens of thousands of ideograms, I am pretty sure the problem with understanding the science has nothing to do with a few Greek symbols.
It may not make sense for layperson but that’s not really the audience.
Mathematical notation really isn't that hard as long as you treat it as its own thing and learn it properly rather than trying to use a likely imperative model of computing programming as a reference point.
