I think it is fair to say that I do not like maths. I have always had trouble with it, so much so that I had to take my GCSE maths twice. This is kind of ironic, given that I come from a family of scientists and mathematicians. I don’t know why but numbers, especially large ones, confuse me: I tend to get all mixed up between thousands and millions. While I am a bit more confident these days, I used to get terribly confused in my youth. I used to feel embarrassed when I heard people talking about maths and I couldn’t follow he conversation – I felt like such a dunce. Mind you, the irony is these days, instead of counting sheep, I ponder mathematical problems in my head to get myself to sleep.

I was thinking about this over the weekend. It would seem that I’m not alone in having issues with maths: many people with disabilities do, and a friend of mine had raised the subject on facebook. Is that any wonder, though? Most of us would have had the most cursory of mathematical educations; many people with disabilities don’t often need to think numerically. Thus, when we do need to do maths, it takes us so long for us to get our heads round the issues at stake that we feel like something is wrong with our ability to calculate. Of course there is no reason to feel that way, and we shouldn’t blame ourselves for the failures of the special education system, yet we invariably do. I was, however, relieved to see that I was not the only cripple with such mathematical issues.