20 Mar Words Of Wisdom?
Sheree Gleeson ponders her own school days for an answer to her daughter’s literary bias.
Mrs Ford, my daughter’s teacher, was searching for answers, and I had a sinking feeling I was in possession of them. “There’s an enormous discrepancy between Rachel’s literacy and numerical abilities,” she explained, flashing scores, pie charts and mid-year test results before my eyes. “When it comes to reading, art and creative writing, she’s clearly gifted, but her maths outcomes are worryingly low.” I replied, “She’s a lot like me when I was at school”.
That night, I made a conscious effort to trace the development of my own intellectual interests.
The earliest experience I remember grasping with tiny, greedy hands and claiming as my own occurred when Mrs Thompson, my Year 1 teacher, read E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web to the class. Her voice was warm, and she always seemed to choose rainy afternoons – when the classroom heater radiated comfort and the atmosphere was cosy – to sit her six-year-old proteges down on the worn square of blue carpet and open the book. I was still immersed in the vague, dreamy world of early childhood, half-interested in the escapades of Wilbur and friends, but more intrigued by the fascinating piece of thread dangling from my winter jacket, when unexpectedly, a magical sentence floated through the air. “Human beings must always be on the watch for the coming of wonders,” Mrs Thompson read in Charlotte’s hushed, kindly voice, and from that moment on, I was awake.
My days were spent watching diligently for the coming of wonders, and I found them again and again in fairytales and fantasy, daydreams and films, art, songs and storytelling. Numbers, unfortunately, didn’t hold the same kind of enchantment. They were logical, cold, correct or incorrect. I saw them as unforgiving and felt that adding, dividing, subtracting and multiplying left no room for creating or dreaming. With gritted teeth, I trudged through pages of maths problems, but there was nothing about the completion of them that made my soul sing.
In Year 4, we began to learn about fractions.
My best friend, Lupcho, divided up his stash of footy cards, burning with passion as he discovered that with a bit of sharp negotiating, he could swap a quarter of his cards for half of an unsuspecting Year 2 boy’s booty. “That’s what multiplication is all about,” he said, grinning with satisfaction.
The same year, I spent hours lying under the jacaranda tree in our backyard, sharing the adventures of The Children Of Cherry Tree Farm. The filtered sun made changing patterns on the pages of my book; leaves, bees and ripe, purple flowers drifted around me, and I was away with Rory, Penny, Benjy and Sheila, trampling over emerald English fields in search of Tammylan, the wild man who loved animals, and coming home to lashings and lashings of mashed potatoes.
Rachel, I have to admit, never stood a chance. Before she was even born, I had a cedar treasure trove housing the essence of my childhood, waiting underneath her small white cot. As she grew, she responded to the contents as if they were, indeed, precious gems – the tattered Little House books with Ma, Pa, Mary, Laura and Baby Carrie tucked safely inside, the taped VHS episodes of The Brady Bunch, the carefully preserved compositions with “Amazing work, Sheree!” boasting ticks and stars and beaming smiley-face stamps from a host of beloved teachers.
When we were in the car together, we played word games. “Some rhymes with rum and also numb bum!” “I spy with my little eye, something beginning with ‘b’.” “I went to the pet shop, and I bought a wiggly, golden puppy.” “Well, I went to the pet shop, and I bought a wiggly, golden puppy, a can of dog food and a pretty, blue-eyed kitten…”
All around us, myriad maths opportunities flashed past, completely ignored. Number plates. Speed limits. The prevalence of white cars compared with red, blue or gold. Instead of drawing Rachel’s attention to them, I led game after game where words were our toys – shiny playthings that were more fun than all the Barbies, Bratz dolls and Cabbage Patch Kids in our house put together.
“You see that butterfly?” I’d ask as we tried (and failed) to establish a vegetable garden. “What do you think it really is?” “A fairy,” Rachel would shoot back, smudging dirt all over her sweet, seven-year-old face. “She’s in disguise, though. She was expelled from the land of Tirn-a-two for extremely bad insubordination, and now it’s her mission to find the glittery sabre-toothed Schnoodle and…”
We spent hours, heads together, perched in the study, searching eBay for books by Dr Seuss, Enid Blyton, Norma Klein and Judy Blume. Watching Rachel’s immersion in the worlds, they contained allowed me to hold onto the elusive magic of my own childhood and provided the framework for a warm bond that is delicious to us both.
As I wrapped up my reminiscence session, though, I found my blithe assumption – that the tendency to favour one side of the brain over the other is genetic and, therefore, inevitable – being seriously challenged. In telling Mrs Ford that Rachel was like me, I had been ignoring the elephant in the room – that it’s possible, even likely, that she is so literature-oriented because I’ve passed down the best of my memories without doing all I can to equip her to choose the magic, cadence and rhythm of her own. Without the influence of my bias, it’s possible she might even have been one of those unfathomable people who actually respond to the patterns and principles of numbers. Who knows? Either way, I want to give her the opportunity to find out.
Tonight, I plan to make twin mugs of hot chocolate, take her outside and show her the stars. ‘Let’s count them,’ I’m going to say. ‘One, two, three…’ and we’re not going to stop until our numbers run out. ‘Imagine we’re in a space shuttle,’ I’ll say, ‘and we see a cascade of shooting stars – 17 of them – falling to earth. What percentage of all the stars in the Saucepan and Big Dipper would that be?’
It’s not going to be enjoyable, but for the sake of my daughter, I am willing to do anything – even take a dreaded journey into the Land Of Numbers and somehow find a way to make them sparkle.
Illustrations by Greg Jackson
