I remember my first tenative steps into the new math. After about the third I stepped into a whole number and failed to resurface for nearly 20 years. It's easy enough to look around for someone to blame, and by hokey (sorry, Selwyn, wherever you are) I had a prime candidate in my Form 2 (Year 8) teacher.
In those days, teachers were often expected to teach in subjects for which they were neither qualified nor suited. Poor Mr Bodkin (and no, he wasn't a prick!) had to teach new maths. Talking to him years later (you reminded me of this, Jo), it transpired that he'd failed math at school and had sworn and declared that he would never teach the subject. But needs must.
He was, quite literally, usually on the same page as us in the textbook. Every time he thought he'd be able to get ahead of us, he'd strike something he couldn't work out easily himself. By the time he'd managed to get it together, there we were, on the same page as him again. Well, at least, many other children in my class were. I never really got past the introductory chapter, the one with no numbers in it.
I got onto much better terms with math later in high school, although it was too late to pass the external exams, which I had to redo once I'd left school. The trick was, I found, not to think about the big picture at all, but to learn the little picture by rote. Still kinda works for me today.
But I don't blame Mr Bodkin, and I never did. It was pretty obvious to me, even then, that I was never going to be a mathematician. When I met him at a school reunion many years later, he was in his 80s, and still feeling very guilty about the bad job he thought he'd done at teaching maths in 1965 and 1966. I think that the group of us who were talking to him managed to alleviate some of that guilt. None of us had anything but respect for him. He was a good teacher - he just had one bad subject!
