I don't know about exotic conjectures by Erdos (nice one, btw), but in elementary school I distinctly remember in second grade my dad ripped my He-Man comic boo

I don't know about exotic conjectures by Erdos (nice one, btw), but in elementary school I distinctly remember in second grade my dad ripped my He-Man comic books because I failed a test in my math class. After that, two things happened: 1) I studied really hard for my final end-of-year exam and remember that we were dealing with simple algebra with variables (e.g. x - 5 = 3, find x), and 2) I never read comic books since (sad, I know). I was really lucky to have a good math teacher in middle school who introduced us to logic and induction in seventh grade (in hindsight, he prepared me for linear algebra in college, and I haven't even heard the words "modus ponens" since middle school until I got to college, second or third year). Unfortunately, in high school I decided to coast a little bit on my previous knowledge, so I didn't get good grades, but I didn't read comic books anymore anyway, and my dad couldn't just rip the computer apart because he is a techie too :) Edit: the seventh grade teacher is in the US, he taught "magnet" (gifted) classes. So, not all hope is lost in the US. Good teachers and good classes exist even in public schools, we just need to bring up the standard.