IT was a bright sunny Monday morning, but I was in the middle of a waking
nightmare.
What was I, an English teacher, doing sitting in a maths classroom?
Supporting a pupil with special needs, supposedly, as part of a career change
fuelled by teacher shortage, my bank manager and a cat with cordon-bleu
tastes.
But the memories came flooding back: the days of sweaty humiliation in school
as I wrestled with sums, the sadistic red pen of Miss Castle, the grim maths
teacher, as she got to work on my tragically wrong answers. A life of
desperation, ripped pages, ink smudges. An army of numbers out to get me.
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Mr Maths abruptly recalled me to 2001. Ponytailed, neat, brusque, he looked
like a man who could smell fear at a thousand paces. Was it really possible that
maths teachers were still terrifying? Yes, indeed it was.
鈥淥h good,鈥� he snarked. 鈥淭hey鈥檝e sent me another English teacher. How useful.鈥�
My only lifeline was the mobile phone in my bag. Should I hit him with it or
call Accident and Emergency while I still could?
In the weeks that followed I really tried to be brave. After all, I was
grown-up now. Feel the fear and all that. Richard, my pupil, was a chirpy lad,
whose maths was worse than mine, just, but he was quite unashamed, spending his
time ogling girls and trying to cadge money. It was a job to keep him 鈥渙n task鈥�
as they say in Britain鈥檚 schools these days.
As I tried to help, I felt flustered again. l doubted my answers to the
simplest question and would sneak guilty looks at the answers in the back of the
textbook, when Mr Maths wasn鈥檛 looking. What was even more awful was that Mr
Maths liked to involve me in the lessons. Audience participation was his strong
suit.
鈥淟et鈥檚 see what you know, Miss,鈥� he would say to the class, fixing me with a
steely eye. There would be an unpleasant silence as the class anticipated a good
laugh. I often considered phoning a friend. Usually I mustered some kind of
answer. Other times I was not so lucky, and it was 1979 all over again, back in
maths hell, my face blazing and snorts of derision behind me.
Still, although sending me there may not have been the best of plans, I have
to say I developed a grudging respect for Mr Maths. He pulled off that rare
trick of making maths interesting as he worked the classroom with props and
performing zeal. The Olivier of the obtuse angle. I learned about
transformations, tessellation, scatter graphs, probability and the mysteries of
Pythagoras.
He even made me think about the patterns on my wallpaper, the symmetry of my
face, how maths is everywhere in our world.
The kids learned, too, when they behaved. And they were confident enough to
shout out the wrong answers in the process of learning. I wish I had been that
lucky.
So, although I avoid Mr Maths in Safeway and haven鈥檛 yet signed up for extra
sums of an evening, you can sometimes find me curled up with a latte and the
GCSE Maths Foundation book鈥攖he one with the answers, of course.