The Godfather: Are those oranges? Do you have a horse?

I have to admit that The Godfather is my second favourite film.* When it was first released, me and my 16-year-old friends pretended we were 18 and got to see it in a dingy cinema in Glasgow. I was horrified by the graphic violence, but was equally fascinated. I have watched The Godfather dozens of times since, but only recently noticed what thousands of people across the globe already knew: if you see some oranges in a scene, then something gruesome is going to happen next. You can see exactly the same thing in Layer Cake but they use Black Forest Gateaux instead. I suppose the makers of the film would claim that it’s an homage to The Godfather. To me there’s a fine line between homage and ripping off a great idea. (I’m just waiting for someone to make a film that is an ‘homage’ to Layer Cake, with a Victoria sponge in every scene.)

I was watching The Godfather recently, to check out the see some oranges and in the next scene someone will get bumped off theorem (it’s true, but don’t take my word for it) when I stopped dead in my tracks. There was a bowl of oranges on our coffee table. After I had hurriedly moved them into the kitchen, I was reminded of a story I heard from the legendary educator Dr Geoff Ivimey. He was talking to a young child about counting. He had a bowl of apples and said to the child, ’Let’s have a go at counting the apples.’ They both established that there were in fact 10. ‘Now’, said Dr Geoff, ’let’s eat one and see how many we have got left.’ After they had munched the apple they started counting. ‘I can’t do it’, protested our little friend, ‘Cos I can only count oranges.’ Apparently the little boy’s dad was keen for him to develop a love of maths, so sat him down every night with a bowl of oranges and made him count them.

We all had a laugh at this story, collectively went ‘Aahh!’ and then all felt sorry for the little boy. This type of early experience can be enough to turn children off maths for life. Unfortunately this is not an exaggeration. Of all the subjects we learn about in school, maths is the one that seems to generate feelings of fear and loathing. I must admit I thought that Geoff’s story was a bit apocryphal (for a long time I thought that meant it was originally told in a temple in ancient Greece), but it’s true. A friend of mine, who is now a head teacher, told me how when she was a little girl her father, who was himself a head teacher, used to sit her down and get her to count and do ‘takeaways’ with oranges. She developed a major complex about her ability to ‘do maths’ that lasted for many years. Apparently a similar experience led Jeanette Winterson to write Oranges are not the Only Fruit (According to Wikipedia, the book is a bildungsroman about a lesbian girl who grows up in a Pentecostal community in Accrington, Lancashire, but I think we can now clearly see that it is a metaphor for her being switched off maths at an early age.)

Led Zep, Tangerine: Did Plant and Page have issues with maths? Ooh, it makes me wonder.

I checked this phenomenon out with my colleague Judith Twani who, amongst many other things, is a specialist in maths in the early years. Her view is that maths is all around us, but unfortunately young children can be completely switched off because the adults around them focus almost entirely on numbers and introduce computation far too early.

A fear, and in some cases a real phobia, of maths can develop very young, and seems to happen when children are repeatedly asked to do ‘sums’ when they are just not ready, or the whole concept is taught in abstract. I was reminded of this when I supported a ‘remedial maths’ class of 13 and 14 year- olds in a high school. I was a bit surprised that there were so many girls in the class. The teacher, who was just brilliant, was not at all surprised: “We have many girls here who leave primary school with excellent achievement in maths, but very quickly lose confidence. When we look closely at what is going on (and believe me, this school took the subject of girls’ underachievement in maths very seriously) we find that the girls have become terrified of number and calculation.”

In this class everything was taught at a very practical level: introducing the language of the subject and using examples that were meaningful to all the students. In that way they soon established the concept and could then work on how to record what they had learned. Sure, there was a fair bit of challenging behaviour, which usually came from the boys, but we sensed this was largely created by a fear of failure. One particularly memorable lesson springs to mind. I thought we’d look at everyday number ‘problems’ and asked the youngsters to think of a simple ‘problem’ and then convert it into numerals in a traditional ‘sum.’ It was July 1995, which was a very turbulent and traumatic month for many British girls.

Take That and their homage to The Beatles; and then there were how many?

There was one boy in the class, Ricky, with significant dyslexia. This showed itself in his almost complete inability to record anything in writing, including writing ‘sums’. He was particularly enamoured of Jodie, a pretty but very timid girl who was, like all the other girls in the class, a huge fan of possibly the greatest UK boy band of all time. It was well known that the Jodie-Ricky relationship was at a crucial point and could go either of two ways. Sometimes you could cut the tension in the class with a knife. (Anything sharp was banned in this room, so atmosphere was usually dissected with a shatter-proof plastic ruler.)

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but who could have predicted what would happen next? Ricky was particularly keen to come up to the board to pose his problem to the class, and to see if they could convert his verbal poser into a ‘sum’. “Take That have five members. Robbie Williams is sacked for taking drugs and being an alcoholic. How many band members are left?” All hell broke loose as Jodie leapt up and shattered her ruler over Ricky’s head.

The Rutles, before the tragic split when Barry Wom left. You do the math.

Oranges are not the only fruit, and numbers and calculation are not the only aspects of maths. Judith Twani and I have written a book called Let’s Talk About Maths! It’s not the only book about maths, but we take a close look at how to help children from 12 months until early school age develop a love of the maths that is all around them. There is a sandwich-making activity, and one with tangerines, but as far as I can remember, there are no activities featuring oranges.

Take care out there

Michael

Eight Days a Week by The Beatles

The Fab Four

The Prefab Four

You may love The Beatles. You may think, ‘They are OK I suppose, but my dad preferred The Stones’. You may be someone who hates The Beatles. It’s just possible you may have no idea who The Beatles were. So here’s a warning: Prepare for a Beatlesfest!

I’m not going to moan any more about having severe difficulties with maths. I just am not very good with numbers, and I’ve got used to it. But the rot had to set in somewhere, and my earliest memory of not having a clue what a teacher was talking about was when I was in Year 1, aged five. The teacher showed us how to ‘take away’. She wrote

21
– 8

on the board and showed us how to ’borrow one and then pay it back and make sure you keep your numbers in the right columns’ and stuff like that.

I think she was a student, because she was very nice to us, and kissed me once because I said, “Your ‘discovery table’ with the little pot of iron filings and the magnet we can play with is just the most exciting thing and I wish you were my big sister or even my mum and can I hold your hand at playtime Miss?” and all the things little boys say when they are clearly in love with their teacher. Come to think of it, I’m sure she was definitely a student because once she took us for a PE lesson in the playground, all about hoops and balls, and got told off by the headmaster for changing into her black mini sports skirt in front of us children and a group of postmen from the depot next door. (Who got a good talking to by the headmaster for disrupting the lesson with their wolf whistling at Miss).

I don’t hold a grudge against that student teacher, but ever since then when I have to do mental subtraction I clearly visualise the way that sum was laid out on the board. As a result I have never been able to play darts, do measurement properly, and other important things like that. I’m not bitter, I just have dyscalculia. However I do get a bit peeved when people with an innate ability to do complex maths say things like, “You haven’t got dyscalculia. You must have had a bad experience when you were a child, which put you off maths.” In the same way some people who are naturally musical say, “Everyone is musical and no one is tone deaf.”

Sorry, some people just can’t hold a tune, and it doesn’t matter how much you teach them, people will still cringe when they sing. However, if they enjoy singing and aren’t made to feel self-conscious about their relative lack of skill, then most listeners will be pleased for the efforts that they make and the obvious pleasure they are getting from joining in. And if someone is really struggling to understand music, but in spite of this makes an enormous effort to master a few basic tunes on the piano, then they should be admired for their tenacity and determination to do their best.

What’s my point? Am I saying that people with dyscalculia and dyslexia shouldn’t be taught maths or to read and write? Not at all. What I am saying is that everyone should be taught well. Some children pick up new maths concepts very quickly, while others need a lot of support and guidance. For some children, everything the maths teacher says seems to make sense, while for others, like me, it just sounds like white noise.

Are you picking up an emotional tone to this post? It’s there because learning is an emotional activity. Learning in school is extra emotional because you do your learning (or failing to learn) in public. Which brings me to The Beatles. I had an operation when I was nine years old, and was in hospital for a week. I had a visit from the hospital teacher, who asked me what I would like to play with, to cheer me up and make me feel better. Later in the day she popped in with a small pot of iron filings and a magnet. She could see that I was delighted, but I unwisely asked her if we were going to have PE next, with hoops and balls.

Obviously she couldn’t see where that question came from, and looked a bit alarmed. The next day a psychologist paid me a visit. Maybe she thought that by removing a boy’s appendix you could damage the maths part of his brain, because she asked me loads of maths questions: including if I knew what day of the week it was, and what day came next. Quite honestly I was a bit disoriented and wasn’t sure, so made a wild guess. I could tell that I had guessed wrong because she asked me lots more questions, including how many days there are in a week. Maybe I was on morphine, but an image came into my head of The Beatles singing Eight Days a Week. So I said ‘eight’.

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week

I don’t know what kind of impression I had made on the psychologist, because the next day the teacher left me an exercise book with squared paper and a lot of sums and ‘problems’ written inside. My heart sank. The first page had lots of easy sums, and a little message that said, “Please help John (the boy in the next bed with the broken leg) to check that you have got the right answers.’ The problem was quite tricky, ‘Your mum brings you a tin of sweets and asks you to share them out equally between the 15 children on the ward. There are 56 sweets in the tin. How many will you have each and how many will be left over?’  There was a final problem: ‘Ask all the children and staff on the ward (including the cleaners and the doctors who come and see you on the ward round) what their favourite drink is, and find a way of showing this by drawing a picture (see*for the results!).

As you can imagine, I had great fun with all three tasks and was cheered up no end and felt a lot better. That teacher and psychologist were inspired, and not only made me feel emotionally and physically better, but helped me to understand that maths can be great fun, as long as the people teaching it are helpful and imaginative.

I was off school for a month, and by the time I returned the class had been taught long division. One thing I learned while being away is this – never be ill, because you will never catch up on what you have missed. I never understood long division.

Shortly afterwards we moved house and I started at a new school. The head teacher liked to assess new children’s skills himself. Unluckily for me, his first question was about long division. When the head could see that I had no idea how to do sums like that he said, “Didn’t they teach you any maths in Essex? I think you’d better have your maths lessons in Remove.”  In Remove, which was a special classroom for children with problems, I learned that there is such a thing as dyslexia, or ‘Word Blindness’ as it was called in 1967. My friend Kevin was word blind and spent most of his day in Remove. Oddly enough he knew the lyrics to all of The Beatles’ hits, could sing in tune and learned to play the piano very well ‘by ear’. That wasn’t enough to get him a ticket to ride out of Remove though.

The Prefab Four playing on the roof: the coolest rock event never?

Rooftop full concert: the real thing

Let’s push The Beatles theme just a little bit more. I used to get a bit defensive about not understanding maths. Some teenage boys can be a bit nasty to other boys who they sense have a weakness. So when other kids used to scornfully ask me, “Surely you can do algebra? It’s easy!” or “How can you not like maths? It’s a great subject!” I used to say, “How can you not know the lyrics to I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever? My friend with word blindness does. And how can you not like The Beatles? They are a great band!” The Beatles debate still goes on, as we can see from the responses of the American children in the clip.

What do kids today think about The Beatles? Luckily some things never change.

There is a big irony about me that is not lost on many people (including myself). How can someone who admits he is appalling at maths have the nerve to write a book on the subject?

Well I have always felt that people should really believe that the key to understanding maths is to accept that it is a second language. Mathematics is all about language. If I could have understood the meaning of the words, and if someone had taken the time to explain the practical importance of algebra and trigonometry, for example, then maybe it would have made more sense. I now know that understanding about number and calculation is important, but there are so many other aspects of maths that we can learn in a fun, interesting and meaningful way. We also need to begin with what the child already knows and build on their knowledge.

My colleague and co-author Judith Twani has always believed that children naturally talk about the maths that is all around them, but unfortunately learn to associate the subject of mathematics with knowing mainly about numbers and calculating. This can put many children off learning about maths from a very early age. Perhaps more than any other aspect of learning, a fear of maths can last a lifetime.   Now that I work with very young children, I can see just how important it is to make sure that we build on their existing knowledge, and to talk about the maths that is all around them: through everyday activities and as they are playing.

This is why our book is all about talking naturally with children during everyday activities and as they play, so that they can make sense and have fun with mathematics from very early in life.

You can read about it here:

http://www.lawrenceeducational.co.uk/shop/product_info.php?cPath=34&products_id=306

And as The Beatles sang, all you need is…

* The ward children and staff drinks survey results

Children:

• Most popular: Coca Cola (a huge luxury in those days, and banned from the ward).
• Least popular: Lucozade (‘Nasty orange stuff’ and encouraged on the ward).

Staff:

• Most popular: shampane and ginis (it’s good for you)
• Others: wisky, Jack Daniels (who I thought was a Spurs player), Bourbon (I thought that was a chocolate biscuit), Tia Maria and Matron’s favourite, ‘a nice cup of tea… followed by a large glass of Sanatogen’ (‘It fortifies the over forties.’)

Take care out there

Michael

Young, gifted and black!
We must begin to tell our young,
There’s a world waiting for you,
This is a quest that’s just begun.
When you feel really low,
Yeah, there’s a great truth you should know,
When you’re young, gifted and black
Your soul’s intact.

To Be Young Gifted and Black by Nina Simone & Weldon Irvine

You can get it if you really want,
But you must try, try and try,
You’ll succeed at last.

You Can Get It If You Really Want by Jimmy Cliff.

When I was 14 & 15 I had a fascination with all things pop and rock. Along with Jimi Hendrix and Bowie, by big favourite was reggae. Reggae in the early 70s, at least what we could hear on the radio in the UK, was all nicey nicey, happy go lucky beach music. Bob Marley had yet to happen; leading the way for the more politically conscious and heavy bands like Burning Spear, Steel Pulse and Black Uhuru. To Be Young Gifted and Black by Bob Andy and Marcia Griffiths was my favourite reggae song, and in a way became my anthem. I used to hum it all the time. I used to sing ‘young, gifted and stuck’ because that’s how I felt.

At that time it was becoming very clear to me that most of mathematics made absolutely no sense. I’d struggled with all things mathematical since I was nine, but it didn’t really bother me in primary school, because I was good at reading and spelling and no one seemed to notice. We had some terrible maths teachers in secondary school, so they were partly to blame for my lack of progress. But looking around during lessons I saw my friends understanding what was being taught, even though it was being taught very badly (Open your textbook at page 23, teacher taking the class through the worked example by talking and writing on the blackboard, then each pupil spending the rest of the lesson in silence, working your way through the textbook. “Jones, why haven’t you done anything? Get a move on! Look it’s, quite straightforward. We covered this last week. You must try harder. Why haven’t you finished your homework? It’s all wrong. Hold your hand out…” Whack!) Because everyone else was making sense of maths, I knew it was me that had the problem. I can still vividly recall sitting in class listening to the teacher talking and writing on the board, and it sounding as if I was hearing a foreign language. I wanted to cry.

It must have been obvious to the teachers that there was a problem, but I was just told to work and try harder. It’s true, that some people can get it if they really want, but you must try and try, and you will succeed at last, but teachers need to help you don’t naturally sense the logic or meaning of what you are being taught. Trigonometry was the last straw. We were being taught about ‘Cos, Sine and Tan’ and had ‘log books’. I made a big mistake. I asked the teacher to explain why we needed to learn about these things. “Because if you know this then it will be the difference between a pass and a fail in your ‘O’ Level. And that will mean the difference between you going to university or working as a dustman. Now can we get on, without any further stupid interruptions?”

Looking back, I can understand why children become ‘disaffected’. At the time I wanted to tell the teacher that he was a bleeping bleep. I did swear: to myself, that in the unlikely event that I ever became a teacher, I would be the best maths teacher I could be, and would begin by explaining why we need to learn maths, and to make it as interesting as possible. I cried inwardly and hummed ‘to be young gifted and stuck’ to myself and dreamed of meeting Marcia Griffiths. Being put through the ordeal of a daily hour-long maths lesson (double on Wednesday morning after three hours of maths homework on a Tuesday night) smashed my confidence. It also meant that physics meant no sense, to me it is ‘practical maths’ but unfortunately it was taught in exactly the same way.

Children having their self-confidence eroded in this way tend to react in different ways. From my experience, boys often ‘act out’, in the hope that they will be removed from the lessons. Others, often girls, ‘act in’ by blaming themselves. If you have an aptitude in other areas, e.g. reading and writing or performing, you can try and maintain your self-esteem by putting all your energies into these subjects. I put my talents to good use by memorising the lineups of bands and track listings on my favourite albums, and dreaming of one day writing for NME.

Sometimes I try and explain my ongoing maths difficulties to people who are naturally good at maths; e.g. Why I can’t do mental arithmetic, visualize problems, or understand trigonometry etc. They say things like, “Of course you can do it. It must be that you were badly taught and you lost all confidence. If only you were to try now, then it would make sense.” That is a variation on the theme of ‘If you work harder you will be able to do it.’ This is really not helpful. Anyone with dyslexia will tell you that the last thing you need to overcome your problems is to do ‘more of the same’: what you need is someone to acknowledge that there is a problem, and to offer you an alternative way of learning that helps you understand. Luckily people are beginning to recognise that dyscalculia, like dyslexia, really does exist, and you can do something about it.

Years later I was special needs coordinator in a middle school, and made it my business to identify as early as possible all those children who were struggling with maths. We set up a special maths group for the older children, and we began every lesson by explaining exactly why what they were learning was important, and what the key vocabulary meant. We did lots of fun activities; like teaching measurement by eating a metre of chocolate, walking a mile and running 100 metres. The children were able to go at their own pace, so they gradually learned to relax about the world of numbers, and lessons started to make sense. We set relevant homework, with realistic and achievable targets, and talked to the parents about what we were trying to achieve and how they could help. For some of the children their maths difficulties were part of wider additional learning needs, while others had suspected or confirmed dyslexia. However, there were also some who were doing well in other areas of learning, but had specific maths problems. We tried to unstick them all a bit, so they would have the confidence to try and try and try, ‘till they succeeded at last.

This brings me, in a roundabout way, to Bob Marley. I was one of the 20,000 people who went to see him at the Crystal Palace Bowl in June 1980. It was a memorable day. There was a lake full of filthy water in front of the stage, which the organisers reckoned would deter anyone from getting near the performers: negating the need for security. The first bit of excitement was the end of the set by The Q Tips, when the trumpeter threw his trumpet into the lake (their lead singer was one Paul Young, who later became a massive star). This provoked the first swim of the day, as a misguided soul tried to search for it.

Things later went badly wrong for Joe Jackson. He always fancied himself as an ‘artist’, even though his biggest hit was titled Is she really going out with him? There was a lot of trouble with the sound during his set, and Joe was getting annoyed. To relieve the tedium, about 30 people started to swim through the filthy water towards the stage. Several made it onto the plinth and started hurling duckweed and abuse at Joe Jackson. Joe completely lost his rag when what looked like a dead duck landed dangerously close to his keyboard. Hell hath no fury greater than an ‘artist’ scorned. Joe started swearing at the audience, who started cheering. Now that’s entertainment.

The I Threes with Marcia Griffiths: Young, gifted and black

After that we were all geared up for some real music. Eventually it was announced that The Wailers’ three female vocalists, The I Threes, would do a short set. Now, I knew the names of all of the members of the Wailers (I still do). But to my shame I could only remember two of the I Threes: Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt. There were 2000 Rastafarians living in London in 1980 and most of them were at Crystal place on that day. I asked one of them to help me with my I Three problem. “Yah Man, give thanks and praise because I and I do believe that it is Marcia Griffiths.” Marcia Griffiths? The lady who had helped me through all my trials and tribulations with maths at school? Was she really breathing the same air as me? (Actually it had been difficult to breathe for some time as there was, for some unfathomable reason, a lot of smoke hanging over Crystal Palace.) For a few minutes I relived all the pain and humiliation of being made to feel useless, but then forgot about it and enjoyed a few hours of great music.

As you can see from the colour photo at the top of the post, a lot of people braved the poisoned waters to be near the great man and his great band. If you look closely you can see me. I’m the one wearing the hand-knitted tanktop.*

In the next post we will explore supporting children who are ‘young, gifted and stuck’ with literacy.

*Only joking.