If only I wasn't afraid of maths

I have a recurring nightmare, and it’s not the possibility that Patricia de Lille might pose for Playboy as part of some sort of commemorative election edition. No, this nightmare always involves something quite different: waking up to discover that I have a maths exam to write — and I haven’t studied for it.

Maths has always frightened me. It was never a subject I enjoyed, even in Grade One. I got As for maths because I got As for everything (with the notable exception of Phys Ed; I was completely and utterly useless at that. In high school I scored the lowest marks in the entire standard for the distance I could chuck a cricket ball) but I never had a natural affinity for it.

Maths was the rusty gash in my armour, the weakness I could not counter no matter how hard I worked. My great academic rival was a boy who was brilliant at it, and that made him even more intimidating. I remember how my last encounter with maths besides having to calculate my share of a restaurant bill was the matric geometry exam. I spent all night trying to cram the formulae into my grey matter, but nothing would stick. I was a complete and utter blank. My father — who is an electrical engineer and brilliant at maths — found me in the swimming pool at 6 o’clock on the morning of the exam; when he asked if I was going to get dressed, I told him I was not going to write. He took it remarkably well, considering.

Luckily, I had a valid medical excuse for my temporary nervous breakdown and the marks I got in the preliminaries were used instead, so I still got my seven distinctions. Seven was still considered impressive back then in the early 90s, before everyone did life orientation and got ten distinctions and went to UCT to study business science. I got my picture in the Star and the external validation without which I cannot function, and I’ve done my best never to look at an equation since.

My fear of maths has shaped my life quite profoundly. At university I did a degree guaranteed not to involve numbers — BA (Dramatic Art) — and went into a field where I might occasionally need to make sense of a piece of quant research, but am otherwise not required to work with them.

The trouble is that if there is one subject that decides whether or not you will get ahead in this world, it’s maths. Without it you are pretty much screwed, unless you’re one of those entrepreneurial types who don’t need to study to get ahead, or a politician, or a kept woman. The rest of us must submit to wage slavery, and the best paid wage slaves are the ones who were good at algebra at school.

In many ways, a fear of maths is crippling the country. Maths and science education in South Africa is in a parlous state, and has been for years. There are way too many people out there who aren’t good at maths, or hate it, or both, and our economy needs people who can put more than 2 and 2 together. The truth is that we can survive without artists and novelists. Life would be less rich, perhaps, and we would spend less time lounging about at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But we cannot function without accountants and engineers.

I suspect I would have contributed more to the world if I had become a scientist or an economist, but instead I chose the fluffy stuff. Perhaps that’s why I keep having these nightmares. Must be all the guilt.