It's fine to be innumerate

I’m a maths teacher at a secondary school in England, and have been for over 10 years. Every parents evening you can guarantee that at least one parent will start with the line “I’m useless at maths, so there’s no point my child asking me for help with their homework”.

Why is it that people are quite happy to admit to being innumerate?

I’m sure that these same parents don’t walk up to their child’s English teacher and say “I can’t read or write, so there’s no point my child asking for help with their essay”. It’s funny how the two subjects, of equal importance on the curriculum and in life, are thought off as polar opposites when it comes to admitting talent or lack thereof.

It’s a constant battle for the maths practitioner as many offspring learn attitudes towards things from their parents. My mother is not a big fan of parsnips, so I assumed that I wouldn’t like them either. It wasn’t until I’d moved out and I thought I’d experiment with the popular root vegetable that I realised that actually, I rather like them. This may seem a frivolous comparison, but if a child is told that someone they respect hated mathematics, then that child will also have a poor attitude towards the subject, and the battle is lost before it’s even begun.

Maths is a taboo subject, perceived to be really difficult, but as I have often said to both students and parents, most mathematics is just like an assembly line, where at each stage a small part of the solution is added, until finally one ends up with the whole solution.

Everyone knows the curriculum, it is available on government websites and pamphlets, probably every school website, and if you still can’t find it, your maths teacher should be able to lay their hands on a copy fairly easily. You can guarantee that most of the curriculum will end up on the exam paper, and let’s face it, the questions are always essentially the same with the numbers changed around a bit.

I believe that essay subjects are far more difficult for the following reason: the student has to develop a theory and argue that theory coherently in a piece of writing, using relevant passages from the text they are writing about and convincing the reader that what they are arguing is, in fact, the case. That is a far harder skill to master than anything a student would do in high school maths lessons.

The skill in succeeding at mathematics is not achieving a correct answer, it’s choosing the correct process by which you can arrive at the correct answer. If pigeons can be trained to perform a process and be rewarded, then surely humans can do the same, with their reward being the correct answer and a good grade in mathematics.

It should therefore be far more embarrassing to admit that you are no go good at mathematics than it is to admit to being poor at English. Shouldn’t it?