The idea that real numbers are real, imaginary numbers are not real, and complex numbers that have a real number part and an imaginary number part are also not real is a natural consequence of unfortunate naming choices.

For me, back in school days (or was it university?) it was a revelation when I came across quaternions. It suddenly clicked. I finally understood that there was nothing special about complex numbers (despite their special names and weird look). It was just an extension and a very intuitive one!

I finally understood that real numbers are the same thing: tuples. They just happen to have exactly one element, hence we omit parens and everything else and just write that element (number)! Complex numbers have 2 elements (real and imaginary). Quaternions - four. And so on.

Yes, but if you go too far with thinking this way it becomes easy to confuse complexes, quaternions, octonions, etc with 2-,4-, and 8-dimensional vectors. The additive and multiplicative behavior of complexes, etc changes in increasingly pathological ways as you increment the dimension. This is not the case with vectors.

In many cases you can safely replace R^2 with C. But there are specific cases where you cannot, because treating the complexes as just a pair of real numbers doesn't work the same way as if it was just a vector. Differentiable functions come to mind because they behave differently in R^2 than C, and when you're working with rings (instead of fields and vector spaces) they are also different. In a lot of places the isomorphism between R^2 and C is actually a happy accident rather than a definition.

And I thought we are talking about kids? There are not many kids who would understand the professors way.

So isn't it first about making them understand the concept of infinity? That they can imagine it, before you bombard them with other abstract math concepts?

I love ops explanation because it separates infinity (as a number) and infinite process (counting).