Too many of us take for granted that maths equals misery

My daughter was recently diagnosed with dyscalculia – a specific learning difficulty that makes maths hell. She can’t learn her times tables; or rather, she practises them every evening, only to find they have vanished again by morning. Numbers are mere squiggles to her, stripped of meaning and floating chaotically around the page. When she is asked to calculate how many pencils Nadia can afford to buy if each pencil costs 8p and Nadia has £5, she starts to cry – and so do I.

When I was at school in the 1970s and 1980s, nobody knew about dyscalculia. Being bad at maths – hating maths, in fact, with a terrible burning fury – wasn’t considered a learning difficulty. It was normal human behaviour. Those of us who couldn’t calculate the contents of Nadia’s pencil case learned to adopt a defensive superiority. Maths was for nerds, whereas we were creative, artistic, cool.

Something of this attitude still persists. Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, is on a mission to improve the UK’S maths. Illiteracy, he points out, is “culturally unacceptable”. Yet almost half the adults in this country only have the maths ability of a primary school pupil.

Haldane proposes that maths should be renamed “numeracy”, to better reflect the usefulness of arithmetic in “making choices about money and savings, spending and pensions and jobs”. We must stop thinking of maths as something “academic and scary”, he says, when really it is a practical, everyday skill.

Is it, though? Is the maths taught at school actually that practical? My 12-year-old son, to take one example, is currently learning how to translate numbers into binary code, using something called integer quotients. (I only know that because I Googled it for him.) How is that – or finding nth terms, or solving quadratic equations, or rationalising denominators, or prime factorisation – ever going to help him choose a pension plan?

But I can feel my defensive hackles rising. And actually, I don’t want to defend my own ignorance. One of the reasons dyscalculia is much less well-known than its sister condition, dyslexia, is that so many of us simply take it for granted that maths is misery. By insisting that we don’t have a problem – that the real freaks are the people who actually like maths – we have built ourselves a trap. Research into dyscalculia is around 30 years behind research into dyslexia, even though both conditions afflict around 5-10 per cent of the population. Hating maths is just thought to be normal.

A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting next to a distinguished economist, during a series of interesting but long lectures. We had all been issued with notepads, and mine was soon filled with doodles of flowers and hearts and cartoon cats. I glanced over at the economist and saw that his pad was full of equations. He was busy doodling a new one, tapping the pencil dreamily on his lips before scribbling out another stream of mysterious hieroglyphs.

Never before have I seen someone do maths for pleasure – using algebra to relax the brain, rather than torment it. It made me realise that maths is a creative, playful art, too: just one I have never learnt.

I can’t imagine what method of teaching could ever make maths enjoyable to me, let alone my daughter. But I would love to find out.