Jayne Dowle: If you're looking for maths skills, please don't count on me

I WAS browsing in a bookshop the other day, looking for stocking fillers for the children, when a title caught my eye. Improve Your Maths Skills, I think it said. I opened it up, saw the words "continued fractions" and promptly closed it again.

My brain shut down completely, just like it did all those years ago at school, in all those maths lessons, when teacher after teacher patiently went over fractions, and logarithms and pi and, hardly

a single word of it penetrated the dense fog which clouded

my head.

In the end, it took me three attempts to pass my Maths O-level, and the only reason I persevered was so that I could go to university. I would rather give birth to both my children, sit my finals and do my driving test than go through that exam again. I think it is fair to say that maths wasn't my best subject.

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So I was interested to hear that a very learned professor, Brian Butterworth from the Centre of Educational Neuroscience at University College, London, says that we must all improve our maths skills if we want the economy to pick up.

Because, yes, you've guessed it, the UK is not very good at maths. Professor Butterworth points out that when it comes down to it, although we are ahead of America and Germany, we are "significantly worse than Canada and Australia and much worse than China and Japan". If the mathematically least-able section of the population was to brush up on their maths, he argues that they could contribute significantly to the gross domestic product of the country.

So the current downturn is all my fault. Well, I'm tempted to say "blame the teachers" but that would be unfair. Because I know that from the age of about 11, once I had mastered the basic skills, adding, subtracting and so on, I made a conscious decision to disengage with maths, and concentrate instead on reading and writing.

Odd random bits, such as calculus and Venn diagrams, stuck with me, but as for the rest, I just totally lost interest. And I know that thousands of children are doing exactly that very same thing right now. So it is with a huge sigh of relief that I look at my own two doing their homework and realise that they have not yet developed maths blindness.

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They must have inherited their aptitude from their father, for both of them seem to relish the challenge of number-work. I hope it stays that way.

But then there's school maths, and real maths. I wonder, when Professor Butterworth was doing his research, what kind of maths he measured.

For, useless as I was in the classroom, my mental arithmetic is good. All through my teens and early 20s I worked in shops and pubs, and could work out the price of three halves of lager, a rum and coke and four bags of crisps in my head without even thinking about it.

I also grasped the concept of "interest" and "capital sums" pretty early on, trotting off down to the Post Office to stash my wages in my savings account.

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And now I'm in charge of the family finances, constantly swapping incomings and outgoings about to make sure that we get the best deals possible on our mortgage, household insurance and the rest.

So I wonder if actually, I'm not a maths dunce after all, I just think I am. I mean, it's all subjective. If Professor Butterworth was measuring it on people's ability to calculate the square root of 198, then that's one thing. If he was measuring their aptitude for dividing up the restaurant bill at the end of the meal, that's quite another.

At the weekend, I watched in fascination as a group of teenage boys divvied up who owed what and deftly counted out their pennies and pound coins to pay for their pizzas in a caf. I couldn't help but wonder if they are as good at maths in school as they are when it comes to their own pocket money.

And this made me think. If we have to improve our maths skills – and really, there is no argument against it – shouldn't we all try and concentrate on the practical aspects? I realise that this makes me sound like a dinosaur, but when you're being served in a shop or a bar, how many younger staff can even make a guess at what the damage is without relying on the till to add it up for them?

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If you can't do that, then how can you begin to make connections with profit and loss? Or fundamentally, understand how numbers

actually work? Here's a suggestion. Let's hide the calculators for a week or so, and see how we get on – and that means adults and children.

So I do agree with the Professor.

Understanding that maths has a value, in more ways than one, really is the key to our economic prosperity. I'm prepared to do my best to help. Just don't ask me to do continued fractions.

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