My son only has one struggle with numbers, and that’s the ones on his Advent calendar. His issue is not with the maths involved, but rather that he wants to open every single window at once and eat them all right now. It dispenses a small chocolate for each day of December and he’s keenly aware that going beyond his daily allotment would betray this pact.
He hovers over the forbidden windows, paralysed. Finally, he waves his hand to signal I can take it out of his sight, in the manner of a king bored by a meddlesome subject. He keeps to its plan, not out of fear of our authority, or the treacly spectre of heart disease, but out of respect for the numbers themselves. He wants to eat the chocolates, but not as much as he wants the world to know his command of numbers, and their order. Torn between avarice for chocolate and fealty to maths, his respect for the numbers wins.
The speed with which he’s formed a connection to maths has been bracing. I’m continuously struck by the complexity of the rules, formulae, exceptions and special cases involved in every single sentence of spoken or written English, or the bizarre, arbitrary difficulty of learning the months of the year, or why a minute has 60 seconds, an hour 60 minutes, a day 24 hours, and a year 365 of those. Every day I watch him learn these things is another reminder that my own knowledge of the world is based on a foundation of facts and laws I was taught before I had any chance to work out why, or even if, they were true.
When it comes to reading and writing, I see the strain it takes for him to intuit the basics. It is, after all, the self-same strain I feel when I try to explain them to him. But with maths, he shows no such hesitance or insecurity. He has a dead-eyed instinct for adding and subtracting that’s taken us all by surprise. He rattles off sums and quizzes us incessantly. Once, his eagerness to grab my phone was for the charms of Netflix, and their seemingly inexhaustible catalogue of Korean cartoons featuring crime-fighting robots. Now, all he wants is the calculator app, so he can input as many sums as possible until it’s snatched from his hands.
He feeds numbers into the screen, cackling with the joie de vivre of someone doing something infinitely more exciting than subtracting 45 from 73, or adding 0 to as many numbers as he can think of.
The supremacy of maths has kept him from eating his entire allotment of Christmas chocolate in one go, so I guess I can put up with being asked if zero is a number (no idea) or how negative numbers work in general (change the subject).
I’ve resolved to simply distract him with Korean robots until I can catch up on number theory myself. Until then, like my son without a calculator, I’ll have nothing to add.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
