I was never spectacularly good at maths. To oversimplify, if my mathematical competence (relative to the age group) was assigned a CEFR level, it would've probably been a B2. This was enough to get through a few rounds of math competitions, but rarely (or never?) above city. I can't say I was very motivated to better myself either. Competitions were just there, and I struggled, probably in the same way that some other kids struggled with regular classes.

One day I was working on a problem that I couldn't solve. In that kind of a situation I would do one of the two things: I would leave the problem for later, which usually translated to never, or I would call for my father's help, who qualified himself for the job by teaching engineering at the university. Looking back, I don't think his mathematical abilities had that much of a role in solving those problems. The main reason he was able to help me was that he had the patience to do so. But I digress. Father looks at the problem, and atypically and almost immediately exclaims that the problem is easy. And then he makes a pause. I'm of course curious, and simultaneously, with this new knowledge, in the back of my mind I'm trying to think of a novel approach to solving it, something easy, something I missed. And then my father corrects himself: It would've been easy if I knew how to do derivatives.

For me, it was the same as if he had said interstellar travel would've been easy with a very specific alien technology. What are derivatives? At this point my father is in an awkward situation. He realizes that no one expects kids to use differentiation to solve the problem, but he also does not want to make derivatives sound like forbidden knowledge. So, he gives me an abridged lecture, shows me how to differentiate a limited set of functions I knew from before, and gets back to working on whatever he did at the time. I feel like I saw someone levitate for a second, only to never do that in front of me again.

A few days later, father calls me to show me how the problem should really be done. It's something dumb and not universal at all, a solution that only works because the numbers are set up just the way they are and because of a very specific piece of information buried in the text. Because what I didn't know is that the day after he told me about differentiation, he spoke with his friend who was teaching maths. He convinced my father that what he did was wrong - pedagogically - and that I should have learned how to solve the problem "the right way". From that point on, I don't remember being taught any other advanced stuff.

And this is something that bothers me to this day. Not that I only really learned differentiation later in life, of course, but the arbitrary rules that people set and follow, especially in education. It must be incredibly hard to create a school curriculum in the age of information. The world is big, and knowledge is vast. There are only so many years before kids start slamming their doors and start falling in love to teach them about black holes, photosynthesis, world history, geography and tax. But why not just admit that some things will never be learned anyway, and let kids do some differentiation on the side?