Fuzzy Ducky

The story of why numbers just aren't my thing.

My heart is pounding. Brain frantically, desperately trying to think. I’ve got sweatier palms and weaker knees than Eminem before a rap battle. The whole class is turned towards me, some with evil grins widening gleeful faces, tense with the anticipation of failure and certain humiliation. Some displaying the same fear that’s on my face, envisaging their own pain, looming fast. The teacher just looks pained, because we’ve been here before and she knows how it always ends. Roiling confusion finally, inevitably, collides with raw terror, and erupts from my mouth as a deranged croak of distress:

“Duzzy fucky?”

The class erupts into laughter, and the fearful kids give weak smiles of relief. My embarrassing blunder has gifted them with a temporary stay of execution. Thank you Jayne…we knew we could rely on you to get it wrong. Even better, the bell rings, signalling the end of form time, and the end of Fuzzy Ducky. For now.

If you’re unfamiliar with this satanic mathematical game, then let me briefly enlighten you. It involved each child in the class counting upwards in chosen multiples, seven and four for example. Then every time there was a four in the answer or a multiple of four, you had to say Fuzzy. If there was a seven or a multiple of seven, you had to say Ducky. If there was a multiple of both numbers or the answer contained both numbers, you were required to say Fuzzy Ducky, which was fraught with tongue twisting peril, as demonstrated by me, aged eleven.

So thoroughly scarred am I by this game that just describing it here is making me feel slightly nauseous. I’m glad to not be dyslexic, but that at least is met with some level of understanding, albeit grudging in some cases. Being a dunce with numbers just means you’re assumed to be thick. There’s no special glasses I can wear to help me make sense of the swirling maelstrom of confusion which hits me when I try to visualise numbers in my head. 7 eights are…48? 56? These numbers all look the same to me! Why can other people do this so easily, whereas I’ve never, ever been able to? Numbers just aren’t my thing.

The Fuzzy Ducky game, played often throughout primary school and into the seniors, was a real educational low point for me. Nothing has ever, not in the thirty five years since, made me feel the same level of impassioned, volcanic loathing which engulfed me when I heard: “Miss! Can we play Fuzzy Ducky?” And the teacher saying, “Oh go on then, as a treat since you’ve all been so good.” A treat? A TREAT? Every nerve in my body would be screaming NO! NO! NO! And then the Top Set kids, those whom inexplicably got a kick out of mental arithmetic (the psychopaths) would cheer. “Yay! Miss says we can play fuzzy ducky!” And I’d be stood there, quailing with terror and rage, wishing I had a gun. Or maybe a bow and arrow. Or a rubber hose. But I didn’t. So I had to sit there and wait for the torture to begin.

Before I go any further, I’d like to apologise to any maths teachers who might be reading this, but seriously, why are you? You could have just stuck to Sudoku or something, but instead you chose numerical violence. The maths teacher who looms largest in my memory is Miss Stone, so aptly, perfectly named it seems like a joke. She had helmet hair, a steely bob which never had a strand out of place, and a steely disposition which brooked no messing. She was a woman of singular habits. She always used the same fountain pen with the same shade of turquoise ink, which I think gives serial killer vibes. She did her ticks the wrong way round, which definitely gives serial killer vibes. What the heck was that all about? She smoked like the proverbial chimney and had brown-hued teeth to show for it. Her office stank of Bensons and the walls were streaked nicotine orange.

I never once heard her raise her voice, being one of those teachers with the rare ability to command an entire class by seemingly doing very little to achieve it. I never witnessed a single kid cross her. She was absolutely terrifying. As a timid year seven, I was petrified of her, not least because, I was, in case I haven’t made this abundantly clear already, completely crap at maths.

We got off on the wrong foot before the first term of secondary school had even started. My older brother (captain of the school sports teams, top set for everything) had been teaching me bits and bobs of German ever since he’d started there two years before. Pupils who were top set for everything, were admitted to the elite German classes, while everyone else had to slum it with only French. I longed to study German too, sensing that my early love of language and words wouldn’t be confined to just English. There was only one problem with this though. Despite being top set for French and English and science, I wasn’t top set for maths.

My mum went into the school to have a meeting with Miss Stone, head of maths, to see what could be done. Nothing, is the short answer. The longer one I can’t actually remember, but the Stone wasn’t for turning. This left a powerful impression of inferiority upon me, and my school career never really took off after that. I felt disabled by my inability to calculate, and it felt insurmountable. The school clearly believed that because of this inadequacy, and despite all my other academic strengths, failure at numbers was what really mattered. I wasn’t allowed to study German and the injustice of it killed any burgeoning love of learning I had. I never really cared for school after that and Miss Stone never really cared for me.

The worst crime she committed was during an episode involving that most heinous form of numerical hell: long division. It happened during period two, just before break, when as a whole class we were methodically working our way through a pile of calculations which were making my ears bleed. Miss Stone would write a sum on the board and we would have to find the answer (show your working!) and then put our hands up when we were done. When every hand was up, she would slowly pace up and down the rows of desks and check all our answers, in case anyone was fibbing. The clincher in this hideous tale of the unexpected was this: we were told we couldn’t leave until every single child had got it right. You know what’s coming, don’t you?

I was struggling even before the bell rang. As other kids completed the sum and sat there, bored, holding up their raised arms with their other hand, I got more and more stressed out. Theatrical sighs. Shuffling chairs. Break time ebbing away. I can still recall the combination of pity and resentment emitting from the other kids, which soon turned to contempt as I kept getting it wrong and wrong and wrong.

“Oh Jayne, not again,” Miss Stone stonily told the class, when every arm had been raised except mine. Audible groan from all the kids. Angry mumbling. “Let’s try one last time,” she said, writing another calculation on the board. By now, the sum might as well have been written in wingdings for all the sense it made to me. My head was well and truly gone. Panic had set in and I had left nothing between my ears other than porridge. I no longer knew how to add four plus four. And of course, I am in no way traumatised by this episode, as you can plainly see from this completely normal essay I’ve written.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, in my twenties I decided to become a teacher myself, not of maths of course, but of history. As part of teacher training I had to complete three skills tests. One in English, one in ICT, and one in Maths. Because getting a C grade in my maths GCSE wasn’t enough, something which until that moment had been the Everestian summit of my academic achievement. The pride at passing maths! All for nothing.

That maths test is without doubt the hardest, most challenging thing I’ve ever done, by a country mile, and I spent four years training to be a vicar, for God’s sake. Literally. Harder than passing my driving test. Harder than getting my degree. Harder than teaching bottom set year nine last thing on a Friday after a wet break. Harder than birthing four babies.

It was like a Fuzzy Ducky reboot. You go into a booth and put headphones on. The test begins. Through your ears you hear a disembodied, clinically robotic voice (think Michael Fassbender’s David from the latter Alien films: coldly, sarcastically psychotic). You’re asked a series of batshit questions, each more satanically complex than the last, which you have to answer before the timer ends. Example: A coach trip has three coaches, each containing 56 seats. There are 586.34 people on the trip, 687 pupils, 0.8675 teachers, and 1/75 parent helpers. After everyone has been seated, how many sandwiches are left over from the packed lunches? Timer begins:

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

This is a plot for a horror movie. This is Night of the Living Denominator. It’s Prime Number Suspect. It’s a haunted house but in every room there’s a teacher yelling, “WHAT’S EIGHT TIMES SEVEN, MANFREDI? QUICKLY, GIRL!”

I kept on failing it. Now my teaching career was stymied before it had even begun; it didn’t matter that my reports from my placements were exemplary, that my supervisor had called me a “total natural” in the classroom, and that my assignments were all top grades, marked at Masters level. No, my future now perched as precariously as a rotund pair of buttocks on a wobbly picnic bench, hovering over the ignominious abyss of arithmetical humiliation.

There are many reasons why my husband is the very best of men, but his patience, unceasing support and cast iron belief in my ability to pass that test is surely the greatest example. The tears as I revised for it, the endless tears, sat sobbing in front of a computer screen, failing every single practice test, feeling sure I’d never be able to do this thing that had always eluded me. He was having none of it: “you can do it. You’re better at maths than you think you are. You’re just scared.”

We went back to basics, and I mean basics. Times tables, fractions, percentages. He taught me new ways of looking at numbers, methods that I’d never encountered before, but which I wish I’d been taught long ago. He never gave up on me, and the Bottom Set girl inside the grown woman, the one who’d been told how stupid she was because she couldn’t cope with numbers, sat up straighter and started to believe in herself. And the woman loved him for it.

Because of his help, I managed to pass the wretched thing but my triumph was short lived. I’d naively believed my mathematical horror was over for good, but then I had children and so Nightmare on Algebra Street began all over again. They’ve since given up asking me to help them after they reached Year Five and became smarter than me. But before that happy day arrived they’d present me with a page of sums and foolishly ask for my assistance. “Kids…let’s ask dad to field this one shall we? I’m not Good Will Hunting. Blimey.”

Over the years people have had the temerity to say things to me like, “Oh, actually I use my maths skills all the time!” Said with all the panache and confidence of Mr Fantastic describing how he uses his stretching powers to save the world. Do you really? I had to get my phone out the other day to work out how to divide a pizza equally between my kids. The fact you’re claiming you regularly use Pythagoras makes as much sense to me as someone saying they’re grade eight on the sackbut. Archaic. Totally pointless.

It’s the superiority of the “I honestly use my maths skillz” people that gets on my nerves. Ok, whatever you say Maths Man. Please don’t whip out your protractor and measure me to death. Thirty odd years after my mum bought it for me in W.H.Smith, I’m still waiting for an opportunity to use my geometry set. An acute angle situation has yet to present itself. I feel cheated. I’m not a medieval stonemason. I don’t have an urgent need to calculate the precise angles of flying buttresses in my head. Nor do I work for NASA. No one is asking me to calculate the square route of the universe using polynomial equations. (Am I doing this right? Are these even mathematical terms?) “You need to learn how to do this, because you won’t be carrying a calculator round in your pocket when you leave school!” Haha. Jokes on you, Miss Stone <whips out mobile phone>

I never did manage to get that long division sum right, and Miss Stone had to concede defeat and allow the class to leave, albeit with a much shortened break time. It occurs to me now that this was a victory of sorts for me; my faulty brain and inability to calculate were just too much for even her steely determination. I was the nut she couldn’t crack. I also had the satisfaction not long afterwards of discovering that for all her powers, she did have one major weakness, other than the forty Bensons a day, of course. My school report, hand written in her trademark turquoise ink contained not one, but two spelling mistakes. Words clearly weren’t her thing.

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Thanks for reading! Please don’t come for me, maths people. I love you really. But if you do, fair warning: I’ve got a thesaurus and I’m not afraid to use it.

Best,