Numerics

Back in highschool, I was never much good at maths - not through any innate stupidity on my part, but because things weren't always explained in a way that made sense to me. That might sound like an excuse, but it's a real problem in the way highschool maths is taught. The logic underpinning commonly used equations is often vastly more complex than most teachers can articulate, and so the process becomes one of rote-learning: students repeating a pattern rather than comprehending the reason for it.

Formulae were my biggest weakness. Without understanding how and why they actually worked, I found it impossible to apply them. Algebra left me queasy, and class after class was spent staring at a page full of numbers I had no hope of conquering. But I remember the startlement of one teacher at my perfect score in the most difficult section of a maths exam, covering material I'd barely coped with in class. She took me aside after the papers were handed back and shook her head in bewilderment: rather than using the workings we'd been taught, I'd figured out my own way of solving the problems.

'How can you do this when you can't get the simple stuff right?' she asked.

'I don't know,' I said. 'It just makes more sense this way.'

Up until that point, she'd assumed my poor grades were the result of inattention and a stubborn, self-imposed ignorance of all things mathematical, but from then on, she took more time to try and help me. Even so, my opinion stayed the same; and I dropped maths the following year.

Now, numbers feature prominently in my day-job - not figures, but contact details, scheduling times, document numbers, file numbers, job numbers, extensions, dates, timesheets - and in greater profusion than my teenage self would ever have thought likely. And on top of that, there's the personal stuff: credit card numbers, mobile numbers, Medicare numbers, tax file numbers, superannuation account details, student numbers, subject numbers, exam numbers, due dates for bills, utility account details, bank account details. I deal with it all, but that early trouble with maths is still with me in spirit, so that every time I'm handed a new assignment that even peripherally involves numbers, I get a jolt of the old, siezing panic and think: I won't be able to do this.

And every time, when it turns out I can, I wonder: how many other people have the same problem? It would be absurd to think it a phenomena restricted to me. In my instance, it manifests as a specific Pavlovian reaction to columns of digits on paper. I'm excellent at household budgets; I can add, subtract, divide and multiply in my head - but show me a pile of someone else's tax invoices and I'm suddenly fifteen again, chewing my pen-lid and staring out the window as I count the seconds until lunch, idly wondering whether anyone would really notice if I set my desk on fire.