Making math a misery

HOW DO they make school such excruciating torture? For example, according to one of these "think tanks," there's a "lost generation" that can't do math, despising the subject because of the way it's taught at school.

Certainly if I had to imagine what it must be like as an inmate of Guantánamo Bay, the nearest I could get would be to recall the relentless agony of math. That's probably the only way the Americans could increase the suffering there—if they followed torture sessions by sending in my old math teacher to drone, "So…what is the average number of electrodes applied to each prisoner? Come on, someone."

To start with, we had to recite tables, which had as much meaning as if we'd been told to recite the categories from the Taunton Yellow Pages, with the class mumbling, "Bicycle Clubs (see Cycling Clubs), Billiard Ball Polishers, Biro Collecting Societies, Biscuit Factories..." while the teacher snapped, "Hang on--who said 'bird-stuffers'? Was it you, Philpott? Have we forgotten that bird-stuffers were incorporated into Taxidermists in 1974, boy?"

And by the time we were 15, math was a meaningless jumble of words and symbols, as the teacher, with his back to us while he scrawled on a blackboard, said, "So--x cancels out v, and y squared is obviously equivalent to j multiplied by the picture of a bumble bee, so the cube of the table tennis bat becomes a minus figure, which leaves--have you all got it--a map of Wiltshire."

But then, decades later, while reading about the Ancient Greeks, I realized that to most societies, math hasn't been a series of numbers, but part of their method of analyzing the universe.

Plato, for example, considered numbers as the highest concept we could imagine because the answer to a sum is the only thing in our world that's perfect. Pythagoras, for reasons I can't quite figure, saw his discovery about triangles as one part of a philosophy that included refusing to eat beans or picking anything off the floor.

And the idea of zero, a something that indicates nothing, had to be invented, maybe in India or possibly by Arabs, as it appeared to contradict common sense. At this point, math becomes fascinating. You'd probably get kids calling out, "Wow--so in those days did people have to say 'Fuck all' instead, sir?" And presumably, the announcer reading the football results had to say things like "Crystal Palace 4...Charlton, a vague and undefined sense of emptiness."

In the Renaissance, math was inseparable from art, as painters depended on it to master perspective. Descartes transformed math as part of his quest to work out what we could know for certain, rather than relying on blind faith in God. Isaac Newton revolutionized math with his calculations of speed, but few people would say he was mainly a mathematician.

IT’S ONLY recently that math, like most subjects, has been separated from an overall idea of how the universe works, and as a consequence been reduced to a tedious sea of squiggles.

But the other problem that afflicts all subjects in modern education is also suggested in this think tank's report. Because it says the tragedy of Britain falling behind at math is this "costs the economy £9 billion ($17.6 billion) a year," and math graduates "earn £136,000 ($266,000) more in a lifetime" than everyone else.

As if every little thing should be measured in profit and loss. Maybe the answer will be to attract finance into the subject by getting numbers sponsored, such as, "25, but we offer such good value at Morrisons, you'll think it's 27!" Or, "Whiskas 3.3333, because they'll keep your cat purring while it stays recurring."

What encourages people to learn stuff is making it interesting. That's why they read a book about sharks or take up the trumpet or salsa dancing. You wouldn't advertise a snooker club by saying, "Statistics show that people who've potted three reds and three blacks in a row earn £17 ($33) a week more than the average."

But somehow school makes people flee subjects in terror, so years later, they'll still reject Shakespeare or Dickens or Jane Austen, "because I hated it at school."

That's quite an achievement, to be given a job of enthusing kids about a subject, and then to make them hate it so much that even 30 years later, they can't bear to think about it.

It would be like a car salesman being so useless that not only did he fail to sell any cars, but half the people who came in the showroom never got in one again, and 30 years later still went everywhere by skateboard.

First published in the Independent.