I was a languages major at university but my parents convinced me to squeeze a year of maths into my degree. The world needs maths teachers, they reasoned. You’ll never be without a job.

As usual, they were right.

In between writing here, here, and here, I’ve been helping out parttime, on and off, in the fabulous English department of our sons’ secondary school for the past four years.

I love teaching English. I love how a world can burgeon from a single line of poetry. I love the loud opinions and leftfield creativity of students and how discussions can veer from the exploitation of women’s vulnerabilities in Edwardian literature to football, TikTok, and climate change and how it all somehow prepares kids for life.

And then a six-month gap needed filling in the maths department. At first I said a hard no. Then I zipped myself into the giant onesie of Imposter Syndrome and said yes because I also love the school. And I love a challenge. Plus, I’d long admired the maths teachers – all kind, clever, intimidatingly cool – and they have a coffee machine in the team room.

But while English is all curves and folds and soft edges – nuance and inference and reading the room – maths is all angles and straight lines and it was with something quite close to abject terror that I approached my first lessons in January.

The maths factory in my (perimenopausal) brain had been abandoned for years, but I was kinda-sorta sure the machinery was in there. Dusty but intact. Some of the cogs were jammed but nothing that YouTube couldn’t oil with a refresher on the formula for working out the interior angles of a polygon, for example, because unbelievably, I hadn’t used that one in a while.

Mostly, I turned to Murray and the boys during late-night lesson planning – Can you just check me? – though conversations with the latter often went That’s weird, mom. Why did you work it out like that? Yes you got it right! You’re doing great! But that’s not how we do it.

Oh.

Astonishingly, almost imperceptibly, I began to find my groove.

I rediscovered that the orderliness of algebra isn’t dissimilar from grammar – joy! – and equally pleasing if you’re keen to improve the world by saying things right. And in the shifting sands of a world gone mad I took comfort in the rock-solid truth that parallel lines never-ever-ever meet and the angles around every point on the planet add up to 360°, no matter which countries hate each other.

I found I could weave stories around solving equations with variables. X was in the witness protection programme, and we needed to figure out her real identity. Y wasn’t ready for a relationship – he needed space – so we had to get rid of all his clingy girlfriends and get him on his own so he could find himself. Et cetera.

For the first few months, at the end of every lesson, I made my classes shout WE ARE MATHS CHAMPIONS! Mostly to convince myself.

So now, let me convince you –

Lesson #1

You can do hard things. Even if – especially if – you’re in that season of life when change is bewildering and confidence ebbs and you just can’t be asked to reinvent yourself one. More. Time. (Ask me how I know.) As my mom-in-law says, blessed are the flexible for they shall survive. Have another go.

Lesson #2

God made wordy people and numbery people. In the extreme polarisation of this cultural moment, let’s celebrate that the world needs both.

Lesson #3

God also made the Fibonacci sequence. It’s a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. We see it on macro and micro scales, everywhere from galaxies and hurricanes to snail shells and fish ovaries. It leaves scant room to doubt the existence of an infinitely intelligent Creator.

We shouldn’t underestimate how our small ordinary lives can be Fibonacci sequences that endlessly extend God’s kindness as we spool out into the striking, systematic poetry in motion of each-one-reach-one, sweeping others into His irresistible story.

You just don’t know when you might be leaving your most beautiful marks on the world.

. . .

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