Ever since starting school, I have always had a deeply troubled relationship with Maths. I believe that the root of the problem lies somewhere within my cerebral palsy, and how it may affect my brain. I’m no doctor, of course, but I’ve always suspected that while the English side is highly proficient, the Maths side is and has always been paying a sorry price. The issue was prominent throughout my school years – in first school, I would spend significant chunks of lessons agonising over a relatively simple question, and in middle school it got to the stage where, in Year 6, I’d escape to the toilet after the introduction to the lesson so as to avoid any actual work. Eventually the teacher and my helpers saw through this, and my actions earned me a reprimand from the Learning Support staff, by which time my grades in Maths had started slipping.

You might think that this would have caused me to buck up my ideas, but unfortunately I wasn’t about to get any more enthusiastic about this most dreaded of subjects. Various booster and springboard classes were of little help, and the problem escalated to the point where I refused to retake my GCSE Maths paper (having already failed it twice), simply because I had had enough. Maths and myself were clearly totally incompatible, so why should I waste time on it when it made so much more sense that my true capabilities really lay elsewhere? Nobody can succeed at something they are not designed to do, so with that in mind I left education with only an E grade for my Maths GCSE. Now that I am out, however, and now that I have more time to pursue the things I love, numbers are helping me. I’m setting targets that in turn help me strive to be even more creative and ambitious than before.

Just the other day, and completely on a whim, I began re-learning French, wanting to know if I really could remember as much as I thought from Year 9 (my teacher was a little annoyed when I decided to drop it for GCSE). I’ve been doing 5 minutes of practice for the last few days, and according to the app I’m currently 8% fluent. That’s the first magic number! I’ll be very surprised if I can become even remotely conversant, but it’s something to at least try to work towards, and it’ll keep me stimulated and alert. In addition to that, yesterday I had the idea of one day publishing a collection of these posts in book form, so that I can say I am actually a published author! At the moment, between 20 and 25 posts have been written on this site. I believe that once I have closer to 50, I might have enough material to fill said book. That total is some way off, but with the right incentive you can accomplish anything. In fact, I can probably count reaching it as a New Year’s resolution I might stick to after all!

Mason