Sunak’s maths plan is stupid and insulting
Of course every child should be numerate, but why put more through the horrors I experienced?
Iwas bad at maths, even though I’m the daughter of a father who was really good at it. One evening, we sat for hours in the kitchen at the blue Formica table with the drop-down ends as he tried to explain multiplying fractions to me. Or maybe it was dividing fractions. All I can remember is that he became so frustrated he stopped tamping down the tobacco in his pipe and banged it on the table with great force. “I cannot believe I have produced a child this stupid,” he said.
Half a century ago now, but never to be forgotten; the cool, speckled blue-white of the table, the burning heat in my cheeks, the tobacco flakes spilt across the table, the bafflement that deepened with the shame because to please him (to appease his wrath) was all I ever wanted.
Was I stupid? I know I was scared of my father and maybe that fear attached itself to numbers. On Friday mornings at junior school, we had to stand on our chairs and answer quickfire mental arithmetic questions. Those who answered correctly were allowed to sit down. Often, I was the last child standing. No, that’s not quite true; sweet, slow Jonquil who did raffia mats at the back of the class was always last.
I knew my times tables (an almost photographic memory could, to some extent, conceal deficiencies in understanding), but I panicked when we got into the jungle of the sevens, eight and nines. To this day, I would probably be less terrified if I were held up at gunpoint than if someone asked, “Allison, what are seven eights?”
Was I badly taught? Obviously. Not many people who are good at maths want to teach in the kind of schools I went to. (They’re too busy getting jobs at Goldman Sachs and, um, becoming prime minister.) In 1975, our lowly set was taken by a PE teacher who came in wearing shorts. Of algebra I learnt very little, but the racoon pelt of hair on Mr H’s thighs made a lasting impression.
I failed maths O-level, retook it with another, easier board and scraped a pass that enabled me to take up an offer to read English at university. But I never quite conquered my fear of it.
Years later, I was on a train with Jonny, a fellow undergraduate and brilliant Cambridge mathematician, who was enthusing about his current topic of study: tessellations. With the aid of British Rail cutlery, he laid out a pattern on the table between us and invited me to comment. Glancing up, Jonny asked with astonishment, “Alli, are you crying?” I was. His impromptu lesson had brought it all back. (“I cannot believe I have produced a child this stupid.”)
I am prepared to believe people like Jonny when they say that maths is beautiful, that its orderliness possesses an almost divine simplicity. But I also accept that the only “fearful symmetry” I will ever understand is that of William Blake’s tyger. The elevator in my brain simply does not go up to the pentagram penthouse. But being “rubbish at maths” is still somehow bad in a way that not being able to string a sentence together never is.
Which is all a way of saying that Rishi Sunak’s plan for all pupils in England to study maths until the age of 18 strikes me as remarkably stupid, insulting even. What about all the kids like me who feel a huge weight has been lifted when they can give up maths at 16 and focus on subjects that don’t make them feel useless or thick?
There is a dire shortage of maths teachers. We shouldn’t be stretching them any thinner. A target for every child to be numerate and literate by the time they enter secondary school (shocking how few are), and to be able to play a musical instrument or deliver a speech by the age of 16 would be far more beneficial. If I were prime minister, I’d insist on compulsory domestic science lessons so every boy and girl knew how to cook a nutritious meal for a family on a budget. More use for most, I think, than what my father tried and failed to teach me: multiplying fractions.
Scarcely believable horror stories about conditions in the NHS abound. From readers’ emails, I deduce that a 17-hour wait in an ambulance outside a hospital with lovely people taking care of you may not be the worst thing. It could be preferable to being admitted to A&E where patients are often left alone to take their chances. It’s good to see that the great British sense of humour is responding to the crisis. Spotted this week, scrawled in the grime on the back of one parked emergency vehicle: “No patients are left in this ambulance overnight.”