Summing Up

Today

David's Facebook comment this morning was "there are 10 types of people in the world; Those who understand binary and those who don't". Quite.

In My Day

How was it that I, whose maths knowledge is sketchy at best, understood him so quickly? It was in this wise. At school I was resolutely confused by all but plain old arithmetic and even that I preferred very straightforward. As I was clearly otherwise a bright and fairly committed student, the teachers seemed to accept that my maths gene was defective and expected little of me.

When O' levels approached a dilemma arose. To be said to have received a good, rounded grammar school education you had to be proficient across a broad spectrum. And this spectrum included maths. On the other hand, it was obvious that I and a few other girls would spend a lot of effort to achieve a fail mark.

The school found a solution in the form of an American exchange teacher. She could take us for maths so that we were still covering the subject, but didn't have to follow the O' level syllabus.

Reader, those maths lessons were the clearest I have ever received. This teacher, once she understood that we weren't of sub-normal abilities in other ways, introduced principles of Maths that suddenly made some sense. Ah! Algebra! That's  why we do it! And she taught us about binary systems, a concept so entirely new in the somewhat staid atmosphere of maths teaching in 1960s grammar school that we felt rather privileged to be learning it!

So, while I still struggle to work out how many pentagons are required to make a globe, I can understand the concept of binary. How rounded this makes my education I can't undertake to say.