I realised this week that I have a debilitating medical condition. Actually I’ve had it for most of my life but I only recognised the symptoms when I was listening to the news on the radio.
This all came at a time when I had been feeling quite good. The disc problem in my back has cleared up, as has the shoulder, so apart from the hay-fever I have been remarkably healthy recently. However, I wouldn’t be properly Jewish if I wasn’t suffering from something, so it was no surprise to discover that I have severe dyscalculia. The good thing is that one’s skin does not come out in a nasty rash, there are no aching limbs and life expectancy is not affected. In fact, most people would not even recognise it as an ailment, for this is the condition formerly known as “being rubbish at maths”.
Dyscalculia is the numerical equivalent of dyslexia, except instead of experiencing difficulty reading, sufferers have severe problems doing mathematical calculations.
Suddenly it all added up — or rather didn’t. Ever since I started school, 38 years ago (or perhaps 39, I’m not entirely sure), I was fair to middling at most subjects but couldn’t count. While everyone in my class was happily solving algebraic equations and working out the value of pi to 150 decimal points, I was still struggling with long division. In fact, I struggled with short division. According to the news report this is an actual disability which afflicts 4.3 per cent of children which in numerical terms means that, er, quite a lot of people in this country have it.
In my case, the symptoms were fairly extreme. For example, I studied calculus for the two years leading up to my O-level maths, but I still have no idea what calculus is. Similarly I recall the teacher talking about logarithms and thinking to myself that she may as well have been speaking in Albanian for all the sense it made to me.
The upshot was that, while my grades were pretty good in all other subjects, I spectacularly failed maths (I got an E grade, presumably because I had spelled my name correctly and had assembled a few random numbers in a plausible sequence).
Even at the time I thought it unfair that to go to university to study politics, a course which involves the very minimum of trigonometry (whatever that is), I needed a maths qualification. At the very least I should have been given an exemption for my disability (and maybe even a disabled car sticker). But no, in the sixth form when all my friends were sitting around drinking coffee, doing Rubik’s cubes and listening to those new-fangled Walkman thingies, I was studying for an exam which, if I remember correctly, was called “Mathematics for thickos who only got an E in their O-level”.
Somehow I scraped a pass which meant, thankfully, that I have never done any mathematics since.
This does not mean that the affliction has not affected my life. I had a brief unsuccessful stint in retailing during my gap year. My employer was unhappy that I rarely gave any customer the correct change, although I maintained that, because they were either undercharged or overcharged, the takings were probably correct. It still takes me hours to count money when purchasing item so I pay by card whenever possible
Bad, huh? So think of this column as a plea for understanding from a minority more numerous (but less numerate) than previously thought. I just hope I’ve written the right number of words.