Mental arithmetic has nothing to do with your fingers, Kevin. One still hears the dreaded — pedantically pedagogic — voice echoing and bouncing off the walls of that particular decade gone by: The School Years. The early part of it, especially. Years Four and Five, when Radio Ceylon (as it was known then) took up all one’s attention.
Not many youngsters survived unscathed and ‘mathematically focused’ after The Hippy Hippy Shake (the version by the Swinging Blue Jeans, introduced into our homes by the illustrious voice of Vijaya Corea who would, approximately two-and-a-half minutes later, segue seamlessly into the Beatles’ rock and roll music before slowing the tempo down to give everybody a chance to wipe the sweat off to Ricky Nelson’s I Need You.)
Mrs Carroll it was that — ears wide shut to Radio Ceylon, I’m sure — propelled us relentlessly towards the ‘mental’ side of mathematics. It nearly broke me even as I nearly broke fingers trying to keep pace with some of the others more naturally gifted in ‘speed counting’ and even speedier computing.
“He’s just not the calculating sort,” I overheard my friend Jeffrey’s father tell Mrs Carroll about his son, at our version of Open House Day or Meet the Radio-Playing Parents Day.
I thought Jeffrey’s dad succinctly spoke for me, too, although my own representative — my grandma, a good friend of Mrs Carroll and not an avowed aficionado of the radio unless it was playing something melancholy (like Distant Drums by Jim Reeves) — marched me home with the promise that my ears would be ringing with numbers (a new kind of music) henceforth.
True to her word my grandpa — a man of few words and eloquent silences — was drafted in, and I used the word drafted euphemistically, to coach me and monitor my progress.
Decree
“No radio for a week. I don’t want to hear any music in this house until you’re thorough with your tables,” she ordered, and having thus decreed sashayed into the inner sanctums of the house to cut up vegetables and get the cooking under way.
Grandpa probably took one look at my visage and saw before him an image of a steep hilly road, with himself being the sole pilgrim on it trudging upwards toting a small, but heavy bag on his back.
To his great credit he suggested that he, me and my tables chart venture outdoors to the grassy playing field nearby where we sat in the shade provided by two large tamarind trees and, with his guidance and simple demonstrating, everything slowly made sense — the numbers, the patterns.
My grandfather was a retired locomotive driver, but I reckon he’d have made a competent mathematics teacher — he had a natural manner of conveying to one that numbers were nothing to be afraid of.
We also in due course settled upon a reward scheme whereby, if I was able to score a reasonable percentage in one of grandpa’s tests, I could have the radio for half an hour.
Grandma fussed about this strategy in the beginning — she being made of sterner stuff — but as was always the case in their marriage, grandpa was the water that gently, gradually, wore her rocky ire down.
Only recently I happened to be sipping coffee at the mall while at a nearby table an elderly teacher-type (spectacled and impatient-looking) sat tutoring two Grade Ten pupils. It sounded to me like calculus, it also sounded as horribly complex as Pan’s labyrinth judging by the ponderous, circumlocutious explanations/definitions spewing forth from the teacher.
From my covert glances over the rim of the coffee cup I could tell the pupils were far from attaining that state of ‘comfortable insight’. In fact they looked doomed. It reminded me of a saying, though I’m not sure who said it: An expert is a man who tells you a simple thing in a confused way in such a fashion as to make you think the confusion is your own fault.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
