The Minds of Elementary School Teachers

My mother and I lived with my aunt and uncle in 7th grade during the Gulf War. This is when I failed math. My uncle was way into self-help and had a number of books on hypnotism. I read one of the most important books in MY life thanks to my uncle: The Magic of Thinking BIG by David Schwarz. I reread it dozens of times. But I also started reading about hynotism myself.

In high school I got a book on hypnotism myself (my experiences hypnotizing my two victims were interesting). Besides describing many manners of inducing hypnosis, tests or routines were also discussed in the book. Things like the hypnotized person trying to lift up their feet but finding that they could not.

One thing that could be done under hypnosis is to hypnotize a person to forget a number entirely. So if it were three, they will count "One, two, four, five." When asked "What's 5 minus 2?" the person might answer 2, 4, or a made-up number. There were two groups however who had HUGE problems with this sort of test or experiment. Very young children who had no concepts of numbers entirely AND elementary school teachers. For those with moderate math knowledge the name of 3 was not very important. To those with advanced math knowledge, like physicists or mathematicians, the name of 3 is also not very important too. But elementary school teachers are so used to teaching students the numbers that in their minds there can be nothing except the numbers they have spent so much time teaching to students, so they are generally unable to do away with a number.