Consequence of Bilingual Education

I haven't posted here in a while, mostly because of the lack of newsworthy math in my life. Since I am not exactly in a position to present myself with new and crazy math and CS tidbits I have instead been reading books and attempting to improve my driving. Some of those activities have been more pleasant than others. I thought about borrowing my brother's math textbook and seeing if I can wrap my mind around math that is near where I left off but I haven't yet because I'm somewhat anxious about the results and I feel that asking for the use of the textbook in question might lead to some sort of interrogation and possibly mockery. I might still do it, though.

Thinking about my brother's math education made me think about mine, specifically the fact that (like all the rest of my pre-university schooling) it was conducted in French. Since numbers are the same in English this didn't pose too many practical problems in my everyday life. It still doesn't. I would argue that I'm able to figure out whether a smaller but cheaper container of yogurt is a better purchase than the larger, more expensive one just as well as an Ontario-educated anglophone. However, learning math in French has led to some interesting troubles with math-related vocabulary. Probably the best example of this that I have is when a girl with whom I took an extracurricular sewing class (yes, I am that cool) was telling the rest of us about some sort of To Sir With Love-type scenario in which a teacher went into a new but underprivileged school where the students were considerably behind and "didn't know what integers were". I'm sure that to the rest of the kids in my class this conveyed an accurate impression of just how deficient these children's education had been but it made me spend an awkward half-hour (or maybe week, I think I dwelt on this for a long time) wondering what one was and why I had to ask myself that question. I guess my killer googling skills hadn't developed very much at that point.

Having talked to other people who went to French school (Max, for example) about the math vocabulary situation, I've gathered that if you switch math languages partway through your education there will be a learning curve but it's not insurmountable. This is comforting as I'd still like to audit a math class this fall and it would be nice to understand at least some of it.