Jon Fosse on learning Math

Teaching Maths to my 9-year-old daughter is a test of patience for me. Seeing her struggle in comprehending and sorting the ideas in her mind can sometimes be painful, irritating and poignant at the same time! I learn more about parenting in those few minutes than during any other exercise.

I started reading Jon Fosse’s Septology series after coming across Merve Emre’s interview with Fosse in the New Yorker. One paragraph from the book made me smile to no end and made me appreciate my little one’s travails a bit more:

yes, I could add, and subtract, I could do that in my head if none of the numbers was too big or too hard, but when it came to multiplying or dividing or percents or anything like that, no, I just didn’t understand it, pure and simple, I understood the difference between big and small numbers, and how to add more or take away, and that’s all I needed to get through life, there was no need for more, but other than that I understood nothing, I couldn’t do it in my head, and the poor Schoolmaster, he tried and tried, he was so patient, and he was confident too, again and again he tried to explain multiplication to me, and when I didn’t understand he said surely I had to understand it, everyone had to learn how to multiply, he said, to get through life you needed to know how to multiply, and he said take two and multiply it by two and you’ll have four, he said, two twos are four, he said, and I said I understood that, and he said so two plus two is four and two times two is four, he said, and if you take seven and multiply it by seven how much is that? The Schoolmaster said, and he said I could figure it out by adding seven plus seven and then seven more until I’d added seven plus seven seven times in all and I did it and got the wrong number every time, it was always wrong, but I should have just memorized what the number was, seven times seven, but I couldn’t do it, no, I never ever saw the sevens before my eyes the way I could see pictures so easily, even that was practically impossible, and to this day I can’t do the seven times tables, I can’t, and I don’t understand why it was always so hard for me, it was like the numbers shifted after I memorized them and turned a little too big or a little too small, there was just no way I could do it and that’s why I’d draw, because I could do that, yes, I could draw anyone no matter who, either just their face or, preferably, someone in motion in some way or another, what I liked best was drawing the movement, drawing someone or something moving, drawing the line you might say, yes, it’s hard to understand, and I didn’t understand it either, I didn’t understand why I liked it or how and why I could do it, but I thought about it a lot and I’ll probably never figure it out, I think, but I know that Åsleik wants me to tell him the whole story again, he likes it when I tell it, when I talk about how I couldn’t do maths