I failed high school math. I didn't understand many concepts because nobody would clarify my queries - until I got comfortable with Wikipedia and it showed me the foundations of maths and killed my cognitive dissonance. When I first learned algebra, I was confused over whether the concept of x could represent x's in itself. That is, self referentiality or x = 2x. This made things very difficult. I didn't see why a pronumeral couldn't stand for another pronumeral and it refer to itself. I realised that maths problems was unsolvable this way and implcitly accepted that for analysis to be completed I could make the proceedural ontological assumption that anything cannot be a part or element of itself. Excuse my spelling, I'm drunk.