This reads like an old fashioned ghost story, but it is the kind where you can imagine non-fantastical explanations for what happens. Perhaps it was Old Fillikin, and perhaps it was just a coincidence.

Math appears throughout the story. Much of it is his teacher yelling at him. (She is not particularly pleasant.) Quite a bit of it comes in the form of quotes from his homework. (Much of that is not correct, but I'll get to that later.) And the most interesting parts are flashbacks to his grandmother's skeptical remarks about the "rules" of math:

Considering this theme of the story, it is perhaps ironic that I would complain about the accuracy of the mathematical quotes. (For example, the definition of the derivative appears both as a displayed equation in the text and in an illustration along with the monster Old Fillikin. The notation is odd in that there is a line under "lim" as if it was a fraction and "dx" is used as a variable, but it is also incorrect in that the denominator should be "dx" and the first "f" is missing in the illustrated version each of which would keep this from being the derivative. The formula in the text is just a complicated way to write "0" and the one in the figure works out to be "1-f(x)/x".) The only point in mentioning such mistakes is that I think it reflects that the author (as well as the editors) does not really understand the subject that she is implicitly criticizing.

I find myself wishing I could take the boy aside and explain that Granny is right that math is just rules that some people made up, and that you are able to explore the consequences of different rules. However, some rules are more interesting and useful than others. Before you go making up new rules, you at least need to understand the rules that are already in use and what they are good for. (Plus, killing your teacher -- even if she is mean -- is not a good solution to the problem at all.)

This story was published in the April 1982 issue of The Twilight Zone magazine and was brought to my attention by Sandro Caparrini. The author is the daughter of author Conrad Aiken and has a novel listed elsewhere in this database that presents a more positive mathematical role model.