There were tears, there was shouting

CARIN HUNT:IT SEEMS the whole country was in the grip of maths trauma yesterday. For me it started the day before, when I dispatched my poor mother to buy me a new maths book, 20 hours before the exam was due to begin.

Losing a book is not me. I’m not the mad thing that walks to an exam without a pen. I don’t lose stuff. I have back-up stationery for goodness sake. Except when it comes to maths.

Maths and I have had a turbulent relationship. It started out well – sunsets, long walks on the beach. Junior Cert maths and I had great romance, no troubles at all. Then there was fourth year. Well, now.

It’s not an academic year in fairness, so it’s understandable that my interest wavered.

Along came fifth year and I hung on in there – Project Maths made everything a little more exciting, like maths with a new hat.

But the cracks were beginning to show. The new hat was hiding a bald patch. I developed a fear of circles. I dropped.

Not that it helped much. Yesterday was a trial. My margins quickly filled with sad diversionary missives, like the overwrought timetables of yestermonth.

“Come back to this question”, “do again at the end”.

Time started to tick away and I was still staring blankly at a complex number question, unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

After the exam, we were not amused. There were tears, there was shouting. There were heads held in hands. We felt like guinea pigs in an experiment that had gone horribly wrong. The higher-level students’ opinion seemed much the same – it was too hard, it wasn’t what we’d expected.

Apparently the traditional maths papers were just as bad. Now everyone in the country has Post-Quadratic Sets Disorder or some such. That should boost the national skill set.

When I used to think about higher maths, the phrase “it’s not you, it’s me” came, rather embarrassingly, to mind. All things considered, I’m a words person – the random letters scattered through algebra equations were never enough for me – or at least that’s what I’d tell myself.

And now, thinking about the Project Maths initiative, another phrase comes to mind: Epic Fail.

Carin Hunt is a student at Wesley College, Dublin