Speaker’s corner

IAM NOT as scornful as many people I know regarding the Department of Education’s decision to allow Grade 7, 8 and 9 pupils, who obtain as little as 20 percent in mathematics, to progress to the next grade. Sara Muller, research educationist at UCT says too much emphasis is placed on mathematics.

Sara will no doubt be pleased to know that I am behind her, walking shoulder to shoulder. Difficult though this is I am in full agreement that maths is overemphasized in education. It’s a modern neurosis.

I was terrible at maths and algebra. It was just one of the things I had in common with Winston Churchill, the great British wartime leader. Other things we had in common were that both our surnames began with C and neither of our first names had an H.

I mention Churchill because he said when he was “first menaced with education … We toiled every day not only at letters, but at words, and also at what was much worse – figures.

“…Figures were tied into all sorts of tangles and did things to one another which it was extremely difficult to forecast with complete accuracy. (My) governess apparently attached enormous importance to the answer being exact. If it was not right, it was wrong. It was no use being nearly right. I too found this totally unreasonable.” Me too. I could never take figures seriously. When I was about 12 and our maths master, Samuel Hope, exasperated by the class’s dumbness, wrote, frenziedly, on the black board “0.222222222222…” He was shouting and splittering, “You can write one million more 2s after that decimal point. You can write them across every wall in town, but you’ll never, never, NEVER get a whole!”

I said, quietly I thought, “Except in your shoe.” The class laughed and Hope spun around and taught me that mathematicians did not have a sense of humour.

New Scientist magazine revealed that Nobel laureate John Nash, a brilliant mathematician, maintained that there was a conspicuous link between mathematical genius and madness. He himself went mad, seriously mad, a couple of times. It is a fact that people who are brilliant at maths are bonkers. You’d have to be mad to deny it.

I recalled some time ago in this very column admitting that only once at school did I achieve an ascertainable mark in mathematics. It was 7 percent.

Even Hope congratulated me. I strongly suspect that he turned into a werewolf every full moon which, aesthetically, would have been a big improvement.

Nash admits suffering schizophrenia and paranoia. At one time he felt all the staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were “behaving strangely” towards him.

This observation of his made me throw my mind back to the time I attained that 7 percent and I now realise that I too went a little mad.

But it was strange how, from then on, brighter pupils and indeed Samuel Hope himself, seemed to be avoiding me. Obviously jealous because I had succeeded in shaking off my paranoia where they had failed.

The reason I am not surprised by this “madness-goes-with-maths theory” is because I am fully aware of how the brain functions. The cerebral cortex is divided down the centre, the right side being the pattern recognising side. The left is the bean-counting side. The right recognises symmetry and beauty for instance. It is holistic. While my right hemisphere appreciates a lovely pair of legs the dumb left side counts them.

But will somebody tell me why matriculants who fail to make an “A” in maths cannot get into medical school? Surely the best doctors are those with a holistic outlook – good at communicating, patient listeners (if you’ll forgive the pun) and with a high sense of curiosity and compassion. Maths is for bean counters.