The day that my teachers in grade school taught greater-than and less-than, they tought with mnemonics (the alligator one). It couldn't have set me back any further. They had confused me to the point where I had just given up on them, and would completely guess at those questions (it was 50/50 chance of getting it right, so not terrible odds when the entire test wasn't about them). My young mind was thinking something along the lines of "wtf? alligators? What do those have to do with... they eat the bigger one? what?" I forget what grade this was in, but it was one of the earlier ones, before I had learned to question adults, yes I was naive. The problem that scewed me up was they never described it non-mnemonically, so all I knew is these < and > things had to do with goddamn alligators and I had no idea why. None of my other grade school math classes dealt with < or > after that for a few years, so I had just moved on. It was literally years later when, I think I was learning programming on my C-64 (10 goto 10) and I figured it out on my own by reading the C-64 manual. Definitely a cool moment when I realized what they were and it all "clicked", and also a wtf moment for thinking back to how badly the teachers had confused me over something simple, and how I had basically slipped through not ever learning that particular subject.