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Pupil: -
<<It's grandiose... still it's relatively
close to us, since we'll have to use it in the
coming years... So, we should really learn how to
use maths.
Nimier: - Grandiose
and relatively close?
P: - Oh, yes, at
the beginning, when I was 13, to me it
seemed......it was really big.
N: - How
big?
P: - It belonged to
another world, a really vast one. You know, there
were maths for this and maths for that. There was
algebra, and geometry. It all seemed really big to
me, so you had to take maths from a little parcel
of this vastness. So you couldn't take everything,
it scared me a bit, by the way.
N: - Why did it scare
you?
P: - Because it was
like that, it sort of made my head swim, I had
never touched that, and now, you had to pick and
gather maths, so you could not gather it all, we
couldn't pick everything all at
once.
N : - Like what? If
you wanted to make a comparison....
P : - It's like a
field of prunes....well.... prunes that you beat
down, you know? They fall and then you have to
gather them. And then, there's an impending storm,
and then you have to pick them in a hurry, but you
can't gather them all, and you try to take the
biggest, but it's quite difficult.
N: - Because there is
an impending storm?
P: - Yes, there is
the storm.
N: - But what is that
storm?
P: - The
storm...it's French, it's time, it's the other
subjects.
N: - All the things
that bother you?
P: - Yes, if you
only had maths to learn, you could do a good job.
Yes, you could dedicate yourself entirely to this
subject and then it would be all
right.>>
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This pupil's
speech expresses fantasies which she
projects onto mathematics. Those fantasies
appear through metaphors: a field
of plums which are attractive since they
are beaten down, a storm which is
frightening. It is all expressed through a
scenario which, in a way, gives a very
positive image of maths: grandiose, to
dedicate oneself entirely to maths.....Yet
she fails in that subject (the
storm?.....) Something bothers her. Her
picture of maths is ambivalent.
The
cognitive
and emotional interaction
here
appears in the
metaphors she uses ( field of plums, storm
).
Metaphor is like a
third party between the cognitive and the
emotional aspects, in that it creates a
link beween them, and yet they do not
merge totally into one another.
Thus, it
permits an interaction without any
fusion.
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