Summing up

Today

My nephew became father to his second baby yesterday so I started stitching a gift for little Max. I used to make a soft embroidered ball for the young 'uns years ago and sat down to try to remember how it was made. It uses pentagons so that the sides eventually bend round.

First of all, make the pentagon. Well, if I draw a circle with a given diameter, apply 2PiXR. then divide the result by by five, I should get the circumference divided into five equal sections. I tried about ten times before I could make it work. By cheating a little bit I got a pattern that looked about right. The next job was to decide how many pieces I needed. That is like clinking glasses, I thought: 4+3+2+1, except that it seems that I need seven, not eight pieces.

Struggling with this has taken me about three hours and I'm still not sure that I understand the maths.

In My Day

The thing is, I never did understand maths. From the beginning, my eyes would glaze over when the subject cropped up. I could do my times tables (that was a simple matter of rote learning, after all; nothing to do with understanding) and add up and multiply. Long division defeated me.

When I went to grammar school it was even worse. Geometry was visual enough to be manageable but algebra made no sense at all. It was years later that someone explained to me the point of it all. Trigonometry was only fun because we got to go outside and measure the height of trees in the playground. And I think I missed the class in which we were taught what a logarithm is, let alone how and when to use those crazy books of tables.

Neither Mamma or Daddy seemed at all bothered by this lack in me. Daddy once wrote on a school maths report "Her Daddy can't even add up!" which sort of endorsed my failure. There was a quite unfounded idea that as I was good at the arts I must somehow suffer from a corresponding inability to reason logically. I do now think that this is utter bunkum and that, with the right kind of support and, maybe, teachers who were less theoretical in their approach I might have passed muster. As it is, my knowledge stopped at about third year level.  

And we do use all kinds of maths every day. In the supermarket this week, trying to work out whether it was cheaper to buy baked beans in a four-pack or separately, I asked my friend's fifteen year old to divide £2.06 by 4. He got his i-pod out to calculate it, despite my light-hearted chiding! At least I could do that one in my head and went straight for the four-pack, so perhaps I'm not so hopeless after all.