I love math. I fucking love math.
In eighth grade, when my math teacher mentioned fractals in passing I brought up the Mandelbrot set. I would fantasise about proving Fermat's Last Theorem or Goldbach's Conjecture. I know the histories of John Napier, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal.
Of course, I was an excellent History student. Math, not so much.
It's a big joke these days, my inability to multiply or subtract swiftly, how I can't count money, how I can't calculate time differences. Just yesterday my boss caught me counting on my fingers when preparing the EPL schedules – because I couldn't add eight hours to London time in my head. He laughed. It's funny now, definitely. Sometimes.
But I forget how bone-crushingly pathetic and awful and miserable I was in high school sometimes, because I'm so busy laughing at how I got lost because I turned left instead of right.
I went for tutoring for years. Different math teachers, different classes, different teaching styles. One would be kind and put things into context – the points of a triangle became geographic locations, binomial equations had personalities. Another would explain and explain and explain, and give up and make me do equations over and over without me understanding why I was moving figures here or crossing them out there.
When it came to math, my mother was very Asian – she forced me to take Additional Mathematics for my GCSEs – and couldn't understand why her normally competent daughter was so goddamn useless.
I'm not going to pretend to be modest – you know me too well. I was a bright teenager. I scored consistently well in English, French, Literature, History. I wasn't even a purely liberal art-y sort: I was good at Biology, and surprisingly all right at Chemistry (except for the bits with sums). But Math was the bane of my existence.
I remember not going to the bathroom if I had math next period, just so I could get out of class for a few minutes without lying when the class started. I scored a consistently shitty stream of grades – 52%s, 43%s, and on one memorable occasion, 13% (fuck you, Napier).
My highest score in a test was 73%. The topic was matrices and I had spent the term break learning them with my tutor. I firmly believe the only reason I passed my Math GCSE was because I used matrices and brute force to solve 90% of the questions. You can use matrices to solve horribly complex equations – and horribly simple ones too.
The best question on my Math GCSE was one where they asked for the number of minutes in a year. I was thrilled, only because I was a hardcore RENThead (525,600 minutes, how do you measure, measure a year?) - of course, I lost method marks.Â
In primary school, we'd have mental math drills. Every test you passed, you'd get a small fluffy toy with rattling eyes. It started at pink and went all the way up to my favourite colours – turquoise, purple, gold. I never progressed beyond pink (I loved it to death and stuck it to my bed and named it), and I always felt suspicious, like the Powers That Be had conspired to make the best colours the ones I could never, ever get.
My mother would hit me regularly, insisting that the only problem was my 'mental block'. I was bad at math because I didn't like it, she'd claim – but I liked math. I wanted to be good at it.
I have only dated men who are excellent mathematicians (creepy but true). I find it an incredible turn-on. In college, the only class I had trouble with was an Economics class. I firmly believe if I hadn't been dating an economist at the time, I would have failed miserably.
My parents would threaten, incentivise, slap, ground, shout. There were meetings, so many meetings – my teacher telling my mother I was looking at Ungraded for GCSEs, my mother asking my teacher if I wasn't attentive in class, or maybe she was a bad teacher, or maybe I needed to sit nearer the front.
Maybe it would have been easier if I had been less of a smartmouth – there's often no sympathy for the confident children when it comes to failure, regardless of their learning difficulties.
I cried to my mother once, saying I was stressed out about the weekly math tests, that I couldn't handle it. Her response was to yell and literally, literally throw a math exercise book at me.
During the holidays, I'd spend time working on my math. My mother is a primary school teacher, so I had access to books for grades 1 to 6 – which, humiliatingly, I needed and was sometimes stymied by. In high school, all the time I had for studying was taken up by math. Now I resent my mother because I realise I could have spent so much, SO MUCH fucking time doing things a little bit more useful and a little bit less hopeles.
My ability to reason mathematically never progressed beyond basic arithmetic. I do not know my multiplication tables for 6, 7, 8, and 12. I count on my fingers. I can't do fractions. I only learned how to tell time on an analog clock at age 10. I can't always tell my left from my right. I was a fair piano player – except for sight reading, where I'd have to count the spaces between the notes, count the lines (Every Good Boy Deserves Food, over and over and over) to figure out which key to strike. I do not know how to manage money. I can't cut in a straight line. I can't visualise distances – I gauge thinking of my father (it is sixty feet away, so it is six Dads, I'd tell myself). Every boss I've ever had has yelled at me for my inability to tune out distractions, my fractured attention span. If a number is in the millions, I can't spell it out in words. I have to count the zeroes in numbers to figure out if they're thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, millions.
There's been nothing in else in my life I've desperately wanted to learn but couldn't.
In class, I'd write 'f' instead of 4 or 5, 'd' instead of 2. Even now, when taking notes, I'll write 'tw' instead of 20. I'd spend minutes perfecting the curlicues of the x in an algebraic equation to stall for time before having to solve it. I'd scrawl formulae and rules on my erasers or rulers before tests, and end up never using my eraser or ruler out of guilt and fear. Now I think if I'd cheated, my life would have been a lot easier.
When I did the GRE I scored at the 96th percentile for the qualitative, 99th for the written, and 46th for the quantitative. The GRE's quant section is, for those who don't know, ninth grade mathematics. I studied for six months, crib sheets and exercises every day – in between classes, before bed, and as the test date neared, during classes.
When I was 18, I realised I may have dyscalculia.
I told my then-boyfriend – a central bank economist with an IQ of 160 – and he laughed. I am here to do your sums, he said. In college, when I was away from R, I'd ask Michelle to count for me.
These days when I need to count something, I ask Anon. He is incredibly quick, and I am envious. If I had his aptitude for math, I'd exploit it. He, on the other hand, did an engineering degree and became a hack.
From when I cannot count change fast enough, to when I fuck up on the job because I can't add fast enough to know some corrupt asshole is lying to me, to when I get lost and yell at Anon for giving shitty directions although I know it is me, not him.
I understand that in some European countries, there is more understanding of and research done on dyscalculia. In the States, it is listed in the DSM-IV and you can legitimately be excused from certain classes and take special ones better suited to you.
I know it is stupid because there are bigger problems that our education system has to deal with, but I really hope that at some point we Malaysians stop idolising math and acting like is the only gauge for intelligence.
My mother told me many, many times that if I was truly a smart kid, I'd be good at math.
But it's not, and all of us, collectively, should treat those with dyscalculia with the same compassion and understanding that we show dyslexics.
I'm not dumb. I have never been dumb. I am a smart person with a learning difficulty, and that is okay. There are more crippling learning difficulties, so on the whole, I am grateful.
But sometimes I wonder: If I knew then what I know now, where I would be?
