LATELY, I have been thinking a lot about why many people, especially those in remote rural villages, are bad at arithmetic and mathematics. This happened after I came across a few jottings on the matter in my old reporter’s notebook. The more I thought about it, the more it bugs me, so it can be said that I was driven to delve into the subject to “scratch an itch”, so to speak.
No, I am neither a mathematician nor a scientist of any sort, so I can’t back my story scientifically. My claims (if any of what I write is construed as such) are based on observations and on having lived the life of a rural child.
One day, perhaps about 50 or so years ago, I had a moment of epiphany when a relative, who never went to school, suddenly asked me how to count money up to one thousand.
I was completely taken aback because up to that moment, I had been carrying the notion that everyone was able to count. Note that in using the word ‘counting’ I don’t mean calculating numbers. I am referring to basic counting beginning with 1, 2, and 3 … like when you tally the number of oranges in a basket or count the number of people in a room.
To say that I was unprepared for my relative’s question would be an understatement. Nina (a made-up name so as not to offend her offspring) was at our wet paddy farm, helping my parents with some tasks. We were all dirty with sweat and mud, and there was no pencil and blank paper (not even a cardboard box) to write on.
Anyway, after lunch I did my best to make the lesson as simple as possible, keeping in mind that she did not know how to read and write. I think she was able to count up to 20 or 30. Beyond that was a mystery to her.
First, I took a handful of green berries from outside the farmhouse to represent coins and some leaves to represent the $1 denomination. For the higher denomination — $5, $10, $50 and $100 — I used bigger leaves and other objects. Note: At that time, our money was not officially called ringgit yet.
With the ‘one-cent’ berries placed on the ground, I showed her how ten of them made 10 cents, how ten 10 cents made $1, and how twenty 10 cents made $2.
Moving on to the leaves, I asked her to count $5, $10, $20, and $30, and then she went blank. So, I showed her how one leaf plus another leaf represented $2, then how two leaves added to two more leaves became $4.
Next, I arranged five leaves in a line, used a broken twig to scratch a + sign on the ground, and then placed five more leaves after that. I told her to count them and when she reached 10, she looked at me and grinned. She was so amazed to have learned a tiny secret of the mathematical universe. I tell you, the expression on her sweaty face was priceless! I had succeeded in raising her awareness, interest and motivation.
Since her question was about counting up to one thousand, I scratched the numbers 1 to 10 on the ground and explained that they were the basis of counting and that without them she would never be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers properly.
As I read out the numbers one by one, first in our mother tongue (Bidayuh) and then in English, I took the leaves and placed them next to the numbers for instant visual and mental references and confirmation.
When Nina nodded her understanding, I explained 1 + 1 = 2 as I scratched the symbols on the ground. She understood the concept instantly.
Before my parents called us to return to our tasks in the paddy field, I managed to teach her 1 + 2 = 3, 2 + 2 = 4, 3 + 3 = 6, 4 + 4 = 8, up to 10 + 10 = 20.
Before you pooh-pooh the problem that Nina had, or worse, call her stupid, I ask you to imagine yourself in her place — an uneducated child of the 1950s and 1960s who never had any reason to count anything beyond 200.
As an inhabitant of a village in a remote location inaccessible by road or river, you would be limited to counting from five to 10 persons in a family, 100-something families in the village, maybe 50 to 100 people in church on Sunday, 30 to 50 elders at a meeting in the ‘balai raya’ (community hall), 20 to 30 sacks of rice at the end of a harvest season, etcetera.
There’s no need to go into minute details; just use your imagination to put yourself in that kind of environment and you’d quickly understand that because they don’t add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers regularly for various purposes they end up losing the ability and capacity for arithmetic and mathematics.
At the level of the individual, this can easily be dismissed and labelled as being “bad at math” and people might nod their heads in understanding because the problem is considered “common”. They too might have the same problem and so they see reflections of themselves in that individual.
However, when a majority of people in a community or even the whole community itself is bad at mathematics, it raises some serious questions that demand proper answers and solutions.
In the context of the modern world where science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) are crucial to progress and development, widespread inability to master mathematics can be an existential problem.
“Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers,” says Shakuntala Devi, an Indian writer and mental calculator.
Long before Shakuntala, Galileo Galilei (an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer who lived from 1564 to 1642) declared, “Nature is written in mathematical language.”
More than 200 years later, Josiah Willard Gibbs, an American scientist, who made significant theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics, made a similar observation.
“Mathematics is a language,” he said.
The mathematician, who lived from 1839 to 1903, invented modern vector calculus. Vector what? Also known as vector analysis, vector calculus deals with the differentiation and integration of vector fields. Jeez! It’s becoming too academic, so I tell you what, let’s not get into the nitty-gritty of the subject. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
Some people always use calculators when shopping. If you’re one of them, don’t worry; you are a perfectly imperfect human being, and if it’s any consolation to you, you might even be in the majority.
I’ve seen several persons, under the pretext of checking texts, secretly calculated the money that they were about to get back from the cashier.
If this sounds pathetic, don’t fret. There is nothing wrong with it because some people are just bad with variables and doing addition and subtraction mentally.
If you belong to this group, use a calculator. Using it does not indicate laziness, or that you’re dumb; it’s just that some people can’t even imagine the numbers in their heads, let alone do the calculations.
Mathematics was my nemesis when I was in secondary school. It all began when I disliked my teacher in Form 1 because he had (to my ears) a strange accent. Every lesson was like taking a bitter pill. It did not take long for me to lag so far behind my classmates that when given the option in Form 4 I just dropped the subject — a decision which I regretted later in life.
Fortunately, being bad at numbers doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you; it only means you suck at math. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, so don’t you tie yourself into knots. As long as you can take care of your monthly salary, you’ll be fine.
Eventually, I came to understand that mathematics is a cumulative discipline. What that means is that you need to know most of what you were taught in previous lessons before you can succeed at learning the next aspect. If you have trouble solving math problems, there is a good chance that you missed or skipped learning something previously, possibly even from your early years.
For example, if you never learned to convert from per cent to decimal (say, 50% = 0.50), then you probably have a hard time calculating a proper tip at a coffee shop or restaurant.
Since I am sharing stories from my Books of Memories, let me conclude with this particular memory that refuses to die over time. It concerns a classmate in primary school who just couldn’t do arithmetic even if his life were to depend on it.
My desk was just behind him and every day I saw him counting his fingers and toes. For numbers beyond 20, he even counted smooth tiny pebbles that he always kept in his trouser pockets. Poor fellow! I heard he passed away a few years ago and I hoped that he went to math heaven or something equivalent.
