I dreaded those mental maths tests we were given at school. The teacher would play a monotone CD which read the question and gave you a certain number of seconds to get to the answer before moving on to the next one with a beep. I wasn't ever bad at maths...I just wasn't good at doing it in my head, under pressure whilst sitting in a freezing temporary classroom block. Who needs to be anyway, though? That's what they invented calculators for, right?
Right. But have you ever been in a social situation where you've needed to very, very quickly calculate the number of calories in something without drawing attention to yourself, or risk seeming like a nutcase? Or needed to re-calculate the weights and calories on a packet of something in a supermarket during a pandemic, in which it’s unacceptable to stand for too long in one place because you need to suddenly be two metres away to let someone else take their turn with the baked beans...
Okay, I suppose I’ve never needed to either.Â
But, the alternative: full-on mental assault from the woman upstairs, wandering around the supermarket another ten times getting progressively harassed, and leaving with nothing to avoid ending up in a tearful heap in the middle of the chilled section…
So, yeah, most of the time I’ve opted for exercising my mental arithmetic.Â
Eat, sleep, rave, repeat.....more like calculate, measure, worry, re-count, re-measure, eat, feel guilty, do a crossword to distract myself, try and sleep, fail to sleep because my mind is just so full of numbers and figures and planning and calculating and over-thinking, eventually sleep, wake at 5am thinking about breakfast, repeat.....
Maths is a valuable life skill, they said.
"Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance? Who can fathom the Spirit of the LORD, or instruct the LORD as his counsellor?" ~ Isaiah 40:12-13