6 – 7 grades
During my first two years of secondary school, I was given the modern maths, with potatoes and all, which came into fashion at the end of the 60s. Basically, I was born two years too early. When I went to secondary school in 1970, I had two years of modern maths, and in June '72, it was dropped... in one fell swoop, with no transition, no explanation, no preparation! Get on with it! After all, maths is so subtle, rewarding, fun etc. that it shouldn't be a problem. No?.. It is? Ah well...
I liked "Matt Modern" though, I felt like I understood what was going on, well the drawing/coloring part anyway. So, the potatoes were sets. Sets of what? I didn't know, but it was kind of nice these bladders coming together, having intersections, inclusions, all that. It was pretty clear as long as we drew empty balloons and colored areas. Then we moved on to things like a set of sparrows and a set of seagulls. We could see that there was no intersection, since no sparrow had ever nested with a seagull that we knew of. But we had no problem admitting that both were included in the set of birds, itself included in the set of animals and so on. So far, so good, logical and manageable.
Then, one fine day, out of the blue, here comes the N natural integers (in french it's more like natural whole)! WTF ? Since I have no idea, I imagine a tribe of big guys... whole guys, you know, living in the forest... natural guys. I knew it wasn't that, but I was starting to lose interest, so I might as well daydream a little, right? And R arrives in its turn, the set of rationals, which, seen from my door, means nothing at all. Besides, I still don't know what it means. Are there irrational (numbers)? Why are they and not the others? I've no idea. It's worth noting that (because I think this is one of the reasons, if not the main reason, why I dropped out completely) that at no time, none (!), did the mathematical jardon of that time say to me: ”Natural Numbers » or « Rational Numbers ». In hindsight, I think that the D set of Decimals should have tipped me off, but I was already daydreaming when D appeared, I think. Then came Z, Q and even E which is the Ensemble (= set in french) with a capital E, the Ultimate Ensemble, which contains nothing but its own concept. I mean, I think so...
What's more, all these letters have a double bar, and this is not insignificant: they are distorted to show that they no longer mean what they meant before you did the maths. And it's the same thing with words: they change their meaning. Supposedly for clarity...
I've always had a problem with people who hijack existing words to change their meaning, generally making them insipid or vile, like the guys who do “R n'B”, a syrupy soup that has nothing to do with Rhythm n' Blues. Or politicians who call “reforms” measures that weaken the public service or make the population more precarious, those who “keep migrants away” rather than expelling refugees. But I digress...
You get so used to being wary of words in maths class that, even when they are used without any distortion,you keep your guard up, looking for trouble. That's how I waited until I was 40 years old to realize that a variable was a piece of data whose value could vary. It's silly, but as a kid, I would never have guessed that this word had the same meaning in math as it did in French. Mistrust, mistrust, distrust.
This discipline had been presented to us so much as an abstract, self-sufficient system with its own internal logic, without us being shown its real and concrete applications, or else in fields that did not appeal to us at all and in a very elusive way, mentioning in passing, without going into detail, that any connection between maths and anything non-scientific (French, music, painting, architecture) seemed, in the eyes of the 10/11-year-old kid that I was, highly improbable, if not impossible, downright heretical. Given that, why would I have looked for a connection, if the teaching at the time had persuaded me that it didn't exist? You see how the mind can be twisted?
8 grade and next
In 8th grade, it's “Back to ze fioutcha”, back to classic Maths, no more potatoes! Well, at least I think it was traditional Maths. Because if it'it was still modern Maths, it's even worse, as the teachers hadn't prepared us at all for the leap.
Have you ever had that feeling, after recovering from an illness, such as whooping cough, measles or scarlet fever, a nasty thing that lasts at least a couple of weeks, or even longer, of feeling completely left out? While you were scratching the scabs or coughing non-stop like a maniac, the others didn't wait for you! It even seems as if they have worked extra hard, twice as hard, on purpose to annoy you, so that you would be completely lost when you returned. That is exactly how I felt from the very first maths lessons in my 8th grade year, except that... I wasn't sick. !
I hadn't missed a single f***ing day of class, not a single f***ing hour of class, and yet... I was completely lost. I didn't understand a single thing that was going on! I didn't even understand what I didn't understand! No clue what was wrong, just the feeling of shifting into a “parallel unreality” every time I walked through the door of that shitty maths class. Nothing coherent to hold on to. The dude was in free fall!
The most incredible thing is that the others, well most of the other students, seem to understand and follow along. They take notes, underline in green or red, raise their hand to answer, recite definitions and theorems (I never really understood the difference), and write on the board without too many mistakes. The teacher corrects them here and there, but they're doing well. And not just the good students, the average students too, the kind of guys you crush in English or French classes... But here, they deal with things much better than you and they don't see why maths bothers you so much: “Yeah, well, it's boring, but you just have to learn the formulas, you know... and then you apply them later... You knawww?”.
