It’s 11:05 on a Thursday morning. I’m sat in a silent, featureless waiting room in a nondescript test centre in the very middle of a very rainy Bristol. Walking here had seemed like a good idea when I set off. It was not. I am cold and nervous, and absolutely sodden. As part of my efforts to become an English teacher I am, bizarrely, about to take a maths test. I’m clutching a laminated piece of paper on which are printed two sentences of instructions regarding correct documentation. I was handed this at the front desk upon entering; it took ten seconds to read, and there’s the exact same paper on the wall not four feet away. Nobody else seems to have one. Nobody else is as visibly damp as me.
Not a lot of this makes sense.
Solve for x
I am trying to become a teacher of English literature. The reasons why I will save for another report, but the important thing to note is the vast number of hoops through which one is made to jump just to get started on the journey. My first interview is on Monday, and I require my original GCSE and A Level result transcripts, my degree certificates, a skills audit, a document checklist, a background check, and three forms of valid identification, all this on top of the references and personal statements I needed just to sign up.
But for now my most pressing concern is remembering how many kilometres there are in a mile.
Y’see, before they’ll let me loose in a classroom to mould the fragile young minds of the nation’s youth I must first prove that I can conquer my perennial Achilles heel … mental arithmetic. I’m unsure as to why my aptitude for anaylsing Shakespeare is contingent upon my ability to do long division, but apparently it is. Clearly I don’t make the rules.
I knew this was coming. I’d been told of the requirement to complete a basic literacy and numeracy exam when researching my initial application. I’d assumed it would be dirt simple. I doubted I’d be expected to be familiar with advanced calculus. They’ll probably just want to make sure I can count. Fair enough. The website linked me to some practice tests, with which I planned to familiarise myself the day before the exam.
Wednesday rolls round and I sit down at my laptop and prepare myself. I start with the literacy test. Audio cues ask me to spell words such as “formally” and “independent”. I’m asked to find the grammatical errors in a paragraph stuffed with uncapitalised proper nouns and missing apostrophes. Child’s play. I finish in half the allotted time, and score a passing grade before I was halfway done with my coffee. Go me.
On to the maths. How hard can it be?
Ten seconds later I’ve already broken out into a cold sweat. Question 1: ‘A group of students raise £125.12 to split between charity A and charity B at a ratio of 2:1. How much does charity B receive?’ For the record I am not permitted to use a calculator.
Now, you might be looking at that and wondering what the big deal is, but to me this might as well be ancient Hebrew.
Okay, Max, stay cool. You can do this. 125 … divided by three … umm …. must be … sixty … no, forty … five? Carry the … point one-two …
I scribble frantic calculations on the back of an old letter I found in a kitchen drawer. I come to what I’m positive is the wrong answer and begin to type it in. Disaster strikes. After entering the first digit the screen flashes white, and another question pops up. It takes me a moment to realise what’s going on.
I ran out of time.
These questions are timed?! F**king TIMED?!!
Question two barges in demanding I convert kilometres into miles, and already I’m stressed out and begging for the sweet release of death. I throw my hands up in the air, and in an empty room I find myself pointedly complaining, “I don’t know! I … I don’t KNOW!”
The test goes by in a panicked blur. After twelve questions the exam switches to the analysis of written data, which is scant relief. Box and whisker diagrams, medians and modes, solving for x, f**k they even brought pi into this. The addition of an on-screen calculator just gives me more instruments with which to fumble around and f**k everything up.
By the time the test finishes my pulse is racing. I check my score.
17%.
A passing grade is 63%.
I may not be able to do long division, but my maths is good enough to know how f**ked that makes me.
If a train leaves a station…
I am transported back to when I was around 14 years old. For whatever reason I used to hate being given help for anything. I was a sensitive soul, and I considered the acceptance of assistance as being unwelcome evidence of my own ineptitude. Dad generally left me to my own devices throughout childhood, an arrangement that suited us both just fine. But sometimes I’d struggle with maths homework, and despite my protests he’d allow his inherent parental responsibility to kick in, bolstered by his own mathematical acumen, plus a frugality that meant if there was ever the tiniest reason to use a recent purchase – such as a fancy calculator – he’d jump at the chance.
I was the kind of kid that would detest any activity I wasn’t immediately half-decent at, and since I was as much a mathematician as I was a ham sandwich I would usually end up sat there staring at the corner, begging my dad to just let me die. These moments were always awkward and unpleasant, and as soon as my GCSEs were done I dropped maths like a sick beat. Up until last Wednesday I had encountered no serious side-effects whatsoever. I’m convinced that normal people don’t reeeeeally need more than the ability to add and subtract, and occasionally multiply, and even then there are calculators in everything these days. There’s probably one in your porridge.
So to find myself once more experiencing this same claustrophobic, childish resistance to numbers was hugely troubling. I hadn’t dealt with maths since I was sixteen, and so all the self-improvement I’d made since in other areas of life just didn’t apply here. I simply picked up where I left off, as a bored, frustrated teenager desperate to give up.
But I had no time, and right now, three days from my thirty-second birthday, there was so much more at stake. If this was going to go my way, if was really serious about becoming a teacher, I needed to grow up, and fast. I went outside, smoked a cigarette, calmed myself down, came back to the laptop, and started the next practise test.
After that I did another. And then another.
Round up to the nearest whole number
Twenty four hours later there I was, dripping wet and trying not to look too confident, or not confident enough. Waiting rooms combine two of my least favourite things: waiting, and being in a quiet room filled with strangers who are also waiting.
At times like this my impostor syndrome kicks in. Everybody else seems so much older, so much more grown up, and then there’s me, in smart clothes, sure, but definitely sporting the telltale signs of a kid in adult clothes: the backpack, the beanie, the inability to figure out where to put my sodden jacket, the constant crossing and uncrossing of legs, plus that damn laminated instruction sheet. Why does nobody else have one?!
A woman entered and sat next to me, and much to my alarm began talking to me. She must’ve been in her late thirties, and sounded like she was from Eastern Europe. She needed help; she’d just got this new phone and didn’t know how to turn it off.
Now, I personally have no idea what I’m even doing in the modern age. I have a smartphone, which a friend gave me, that I use primarily as an mp3 player and occasionally, if I’m near some wifi, as a backup laptop. It’s the only smartphone I’ve ever owned. It doesn’t even have a simcard. For calls and messages I use a €25 Samsung I bought back in 2012. It sends and receives phone calls and texts, has a few basic functions such as an alarm clock, a stopwatch, the ubiquitous calculator, and does absolutely f**k all else. You can drop it, throw it around, leave it in the sink overnight, and it’ll be just fine. You can measure the battery life with a calendar. I bloody love it.
Sadly this leaves me embarrassingly ill-equipped for questions such as ‘How do I smartphone?’ All I could do was flap around and smile and apologise and chuckle in that oh-so-English “Oh dear, aren’t I daft?” kind of way. Clearly my maths was so bad I couldn’t work out how to turn off a phone. My fragile confidence was waning. Frankly I didn’t hold out much hope for her either.
Eventually I was released from this purgatory and asked to enter a small office, where I handed over my documentation and confirmed that I was who I claimed to be, and not some wayward youth trying to get their kicks by pretending to get into teaching (kids these days, eh?) Before I could enter the computer room I was asked to turn off my mobile phone, remove everything from my pockets, take off my wristwatch, and place everything in a locker. I thought about asking if I could keep my shoes on, wondering briefly if the test somehow involved a short flight on a commercial aircraft.
I went back to the waiting room to use said lockers, and this is where things began to turn around. Each one was numbered, and as I was waiting the kid in me had decided to pick locker number 8, as that was Chris Waddle’s shirt number for Sheffield Wednesday back in the early 90s. However it just so happened that, upon returning to the lockers, number 13 was at eye level, and that ignited the impish fate-tempter in me…
Dividing by zero
I love jinxing things. It drives people mad. I often loudly guarantee there’ll be no traffic on the way home from work so as to provoke howls of complaint from my colleagues, as if scores of motorists are idling on side roads waiting for the go-ahead from karma before throttling into action to plug the roads and teach me a lesson in hubris. Come on, it’s just silly (I hate to break it to you, but the universe doesn’t give a sh*t about you) and I’m just enough of an little sh*t to poke people about it. I’m a kid brother to an older sister, it’s in my nature, shame on me, I know, I’m sorry, whatever.
So I thought, “Ah f**k it, let’s do it, I’ll show the universe who’s boss, I bet nobody uses this locker,” before stuffing in my clammy belongings and doing an about face, standing a little taller at my minor act of cosmic defiance. I began to feel in control again. On such things fates are decided.
I entered the computer room where a stern, officious lady checked my ears, presumably to ensure I didn’t have a secret radio link to a crew of nerdy data-crunchers hunched over beeping high-tech machinery, ready to feed me numbers from a nearby van. They then asked me to roll up my sleeves, thereby proving I wasn’t trying to smuggle in any algebra, before I was finally shown to my desk. I promptly swatted aside the literacy exam like it wasn’t even there, and progressed to the main event.
It was time. I took a deep breath, reminded myself not to panic, panicked a bit, and clicked start.
And just like that it was over.
I passed.
Step one, plus step two …
The next eighteen months stretch ahead of me like a vast wilderness. Lying in wait are numerous obstacles, heartbreaks, moments of anguish and confusion, and stacks and stacks of doubt. And so I take heart in small moments like this where I remind myself that, despite my anxiety, perpetual lack of confidence, and incessant overthinking, I can clamber up, and over, and come down the other side, and carry on.
I will need to toughen up. This was step one of a thousand mile hike, and I very nearly lost my mind because someone asked me to do fractions. But I got it done, and if you aren’t allowed to appropriately indulge in your triumphs then what joy is there in progress? I allow myself a brief moment of celebration, in apple-based liquid form as is customary in the South West, and brace myself for the next wave.
On Monday I have my first interview.
We go again.
As for maths, f**k maths, maths can go die in a fire.
Lush Gutters 