Maths was never my thing. I quite enjoyed it at O-level, to the extent that I chose to do it at A-level. As early as the first week of the A-level course, however, it became abundantly clear that the subject was quite beyond me. I simply couldn’t make head or tail of what the teacher was on about.
Looking around at the rest of the class quietly getting on with it, I remember wondering if there had been some primer course over the summer that everyone but me had attended. I just didn’t get it. There didn’t seem to be any certainties any more, rarely anything so straightforward as a right or wrong answer. There were enough grey areas in my other subjects – English and history. From my maths I wanted certainty, objective truth, which as far as I could see wasn’t part of it any more.
Where were the times tables, for example? I’d nailed those good and proper at a very early age. In ascending order of difficulty I would rate them as follows: two, 10, five, 11, three, four, six, eight, seven and 12. You’ll notice that the nine times table does not feature on this list. Why? Well, I found it too easy. It was my speciality. But that’s because I was cheating – or so it felt – as someone had showed me a quick trick with which to nail the nines, as it were.
For this reason, I was fascinated to read that in an analysis of times tables answers by primary school children, it was ones that involved the number nine that were most often wrong. They’re not the only ones. When the then school standards minister Nick Gibb announced the rollout of national multiplication tests in 2018, he refused to attempt 8×9 on ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
What’s the matter with everyone? Nines are easy! If you kind of cheat, like me.
What you do is this. Hold your hands up, palms facing you. If it’s 8×9 you’re interested in, just fold down the eighth digit from the left, which will be the middle finger of your right hand. Now count the number of digits still standing to the left of the one you’ve folded down. There will be seven. Now count the number still standing to the right of the one you’ve folded down. There will be two. And there’s your answer: 8×9=72. And it works for every digit, right up to 10×9.
After that, admittedly, I’m stumped. Thank God for calculators.
