THE QUACK

AUDIO QUACK

School was great, until they started to teach us Maths. I was happy sounding out words and finger painting, but an hour of numbers, I couldn’t get on board with. 

We began with the basics 1-10. The only number I liked out of this lot was 5, and that was because the teacher told me that 5 was a little man with a big fat tummy, who wore a hat

In Year 4, my maths journey hit a significant landmark when I was told I had to join a lunchtime club called ‘Springboard’. At first I thought I had been selected for ‘Springboard’ because I was one of the best, and they wanted to train the best so they could be, well, even more, the best. And so, feeling superior, I went along to that terrapin building to start Springboard…

Mr Marcus (a gorgeous teacher wasted on 7-year-olds) gave us our first task to solve, which was an extremely simple sequence. This is daft, I thought, why would they be training the best to do this? I then looked around at the other ‘Springboarders’ Ben … Sophie …. Rachel …these were the stupidest kids of the year. And then Mr Marcus showed us the next sequence…and I didn’t quite know what number would come next.

It was there in that terrapin building with Mr Marcus and his great hair, that I realised that I hated maths, and was also not very good at it.

My emotional relationship with the subject was further tarnished in a new school in Year 6, when Mrs B blew her lid when I did the homework all wrong. I spent the hour trying not to cry in front of all my new classmates, but those chunky tears kept coming and falling onto my exercise book which was covered in big angry Xs.

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

The last time I saw Mrs B was on tv, she was watching her husband play from the audience of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

He didn’t win the million.

It was off to senior school and straight to the bottom set, equipped with some brand new tools. The calculator was busier, plastic triangles and semi-circles joined the ruler family, and then the angry compass that stabbed me every time I opened my pencil case.

Maths was painful.

I found my maths soul mate, Sausage, who made my inevitable failing maths journey a little easier. For the next five years we distracted each other with celebrity gossip and sleepover plans, anything to avoid the scary whiteboard which now had double figure divisions all over it.

There were a few things that I didn’t mind about the subject. I liked graphs, specifically colouring in the bars of the graphs. I also liked probability like...How probable is it that the sun will rise tomorrow?

I adored dressing Billy…How many outfits can Billy wear if he has; 1 red shirt, 1 blue -shirt, 1 yellow shirt, 1 blue pair of trousers, and 1 black pair of trousers?

 I could dress Billy, that wasn’t a problem.

What I couldn’t get my head around was when they asked me to do things like, rotate this kite 90 degrees anticlockwise. I would go in optimistic, but somehow the paper would end up so grey and smudged from rubbed-out attempts, that by the end there was no 90 degrees kite, but an abstract piece of art.

The GCSE era marked a two-year countdown to the end of my maths life. Sausage and I used this time wisely discussing Paris Hilton’s DUI and Britney’s VMA performance . It also never got old singing ‘Fever’ to our maths teacher, Mrs Fever. Anything to avoid the white board which now had letters as well as numbers on it.

Consequently, By the time I was sitting in silence, away from Sausage in that cold hall with the GCSE paper in front of me, I still couldn’t flip, reflect or do whatever they wanted me to do with that shape. And I had enough maths knowledge to know that 90 minutes wasn’t enough time for me to solve the double figure division.

And so, the grade came back in the summer and I had to retake. All was fine though, because so did Sausage. 

We spent the first term of sixth form together in an after-school maths class. Like two dogs in training, our teacher gifted us gummy bears every time we got an answer correct. The gelatine shaped animals should have been introduced a lot earlier, because on the second attempt of the exam we passed. Not with flying colours…but we passed. Finally the maths journey could end…. or could it?

People often say that what we learnt in school is never used in life. 

I disagree. There are times when I really wished I listened to Mrs Fever, rather than analysisng Justin Timberlake’s love life. (He had recently broken up with Cameron Diaz and then not long after started dating Jessica Biel…it was big news).

Turns out maths is quite handy to have in life. Splitting a bar bill in your head is not only handy, but also quite impressive. And it would be cool to know if I rotated my bed ninty degrees, would it still fit in my room? It can also get expensive when I misjudge the sale discount at Reiss

But still, I learnt a few things.

How many outfits can I make out of blue top, white top, red top, blue jeans and white trousers.

The probability of a finance man being a cokehead if you meet him in The Ned on a Thursday night…. Very likely.

If you put the right numbers into your calculator and flip it upside down, it spells out ‘boobless.’

I don’t have the metabolism for gummy bears.

And Peggy Lee’s Fever sounds hilarious when sung with a cockney accent.