Text Aopinion column
I was never 'not a maths person'
Original opinion column written for this course
[1] For most of my adult life I have introduced myself, sooner or later, with the same small confession. Someone hands me a restaurant bill to divide, or a spreadsheet at work, and I laugh and say, "Oh, don't give that to me, I'm not a maths person." People laugh back. Nobody has ever argued. It is one of the few self-insults that British society not only tolerates but seems to find charming.
[2] I picked up the label at eleven, from a teacher who meant no harm. After a disastrous test on fractions, she patted my shoulder and told me that some of us were "word people" and some were "number people", and that this was perfectly fine. I went home relieved. I had been handed an identity, and with it, a permission slip: I never had to try at maths again.
[3] And I didn't. For the next five years I treated every equation as a foreign country I had no plans to visit. When I scraped a pass at sixteen, my parents were delighted, and so was I, because it meant the subject was finally over. What none of us noticed was how neatly the prophecy had fulfilled itself. I was bad at maths because I had stopped practising, and I had stopped practising because I was bad at maths.
[4] The spell broke, unexpectedly, at forty-three. My daughter, then twelve, came home in tears over simultaneous equations and announced that she was "just not a maths person, like Mum". Hearing my own phrase in her mouth was like catching sight of myself in a shop window and not recognising the stranger. I had passed it down as carelessly as a cold.
[5] So I did something I had sworn never to do: I sat down beside her and learned it. It was slow and, at first, humiliating. I had forgotten things that she, at twelve, took for granted. But over a term of evenings at the kitchen table, something odd happened. The problems began to feel less like a verdict on my intelligence and more like puzzles, the sort I happily attempt in the Saturday paper without ever calling myself "a crossword person".
[6] I am not claiming that everyone can become a gifted mathematician, or that talent is a myth. Some people clearly find numbers easier than others do, just as some find it easier to sing in tune. My point is narrower. When we say "I'm not a maths person", we are not describing a fact about our brains. We are describing a history: of lessons we stopped attending to, of teachers who gave up on us, of a culture that lets us shrug off numbers in a way it would never let us shrug off reading.
[7] Imagine an adult cheerfully announcing at a dinner party, "Oh, I'm not a reading person," and expecting sympathetic laughter. They would be met with an awkward silence. Yet the equivalent remark about maths is practically a social lubricant.
[8] My daughter passed her exams last summer, comfortably rather than brilliantly, and I still need a calculator for the restaurant bill. But we have both retired the phrase. When it slips out of a friend's mouth now, I don't lecture; I simply ask, "Are you sure you're not just out of practice?" Usually there is a pause. Sometimes, that pause is where a new story starts.