I also came across “Comment j'ai détesté les maths” (How I hated maths), a film that aims to give a voice to those who have been excluded from maths and even to those who can manage it but don't like it. So, at first, you do hear people (not really) explaining why they don't like maths. It's more of an allergic reaction than a real reflection on the subject, except for two or three people.
You gradually move on to a few speakers who try out some techniques, which is already more interesting. Then a large third is finally left to the same people. We are shown how much fun they have during a maths conference, putting together algorithms that they invent so that they never find themselves at the same dinner table with the same people two nights in a row, just to mix it up. Cool, but frankly, I don't give a s...! And when I hear Villani (him again, sorry because a priori I rather like him) explain that he has heard so many people say that they were at the last place in the maths class that he begins to doubt it because that would be too many at the very bottom, I reply that in our high school we had two literature classes in the final year. At a guess, in mine, there were 4 or 5 of us who were complete rubbish at maths out of 27. If I extrapolate that, it makes say 8 for our school in the final year of literature-based studies. How many high schools are there in France? How many classes per high school? Per junior high school? Do the maths Cédric!
His reasoning is typical of someone who never had any real trouble with the subject in his youth and therefore thinks that people just exaggerate their difficulties. So what if the guy was only second to last, or third from last? What does it change? Nothing, he was or felt just as incompetent.
I much prefer the other speaker, François Sauvageot, who, if I understand correctly, has stopped being a researcher to become a teacher. He explains that his teacher, having asked him in his adolescence to help his less successful classmates, made him realize that everything he saw, understood and took for granted, everything about which he felt no difficulty, was, for others, insurmountable obstacles or black holes that plunged them into abysses of perplexity. Afterwards, there is a good part that is a kind of unacknowledged “mea culpa” about modern maths. That partly explains the reasons for the mess I went through.
The film is available on YouTube in full (and in french):
