Maths

What skills or lessons have you learned recently?

I use Duolingo as part of keeping my mind active, I had been doing Spanish but it became boring.

No disrespect to that gorgeous language, but I got fed up with suddenly having new words thrown in and then being asked what they were or to use them. Spanish resonates with me in a way other languages haven’t in the past. I’ll go back to it.

So I moved on to maths. It’s fun. I still can’t operate the operators very well, two minuses make a plus, okay, but then you add brackets and that’s a curve too far.

Kind of reminds me of life, sometimes what looks bad is in fact good, but add in complications and it’s a conundrum too far. Simplicity rocks.

The magic of mathematics

I used to hate it until I did an Access to Higher Education course when I was 39. They tested our maths and English skills. English as always pretty good, I cannot describe grammar but apparently I can use it pretty well.

Maths I was delighted with. I scored 70%. I was over the moon. They put me in the bottom group! When I asked why they said I’d created some very creative work arounds to get the answers I needed. What did they expect from a writer?

17% = 10% + 5% + 2 1/2%

I still have to. I couldn’t work it out any other way, and I don’t care, I can do it!

What stopped me hating maths was the inspirational style of the tutor. She wrote down the 26 letters of the UK alphabet, and below it the numbers 0-9. That was the first time I realised that 10 technically doesn’t exist! Just like words, you start playing with the basic building blocks then mix then up, but using just 9 numbers.

That’s all! Everything suddenly became much simpler. More manageable. Even PODMAS made sense until you added double negatives.

Parentheses – operators – divide – multiply – add – subtract. They call it BODMAS now, B for brackets.

But the magic was truly magical, something new and remarkable I’d never known!

The willingness to keep learning…

Opens doors in the mind to new ways of understanding life.

She told us this:

With language you can describe the universe we live in, but it is only with mathematics that you can learn about, understand, access make sense of it.

As such mathematics is a beautiful and adventurous language. Not something to be feared. Just another way of communicating, and we call all do that.

That simplified everything.

Deb xx