The Ghost of Mathsmas Past

I have an exam tomorrow morning. It will be the first exam I’ve sat since 2008 or 2009, probably. And it’s for maths. Ok, no, it’s not a “maths exam” as such; it’s for a course about how to teach maths to primary school students. In case you missed the memo, I am in fact studying primary education, so suddenly I have to know about easy things like addition and subtraction, and less easy things like algebra and how to teach children to count. Can you even conceive of a time when you didn’t know how to count? That was a thing. That’s a thing lots of people are good at teaching to small children. That’s a thing I’m being examined on tomorrow morning. So given that my brain is completely consumed with studying, I’m not really in a place to write a blog about anything else. NO DON’T LEAVE. This isn’t a post about maths, honest, it’s a post about changing your opinons, and how weird that shit is.

To give you some context, I’d like to take you on a little journey back in time. The year is 2005, and yours truly is standing in a jewellery shop in Indooroopilly Shopping Centre, Brisbane. Teen Lizzy is wearing a school uniform and is excitedly looking at a pink love heart pendant. The shop assistant asks if it’s a gift or for Teen Lizzy. “It’s for me,” she says, “it’s a present to myself for finishing maths forever”. That’s right, I had just come from my Grade 12 Maths A exam, and I had walked up to the shops and bought myself a necklace because I deserved it, apparently, for having survived 12 years of mathematical torture. And because I genuinely thought that 1. pink love heart pendants were cool and 2. I’d never have to do maths again. Bless.

I mean... to look at me... it's actually quite surprising I wasn't any good at maths. #nerd4lyf

Skip forward a couple of years, we’re in a university exam hall, and I’m feverishly writing answers that look remarkably like maths onto an exam paper. Having chosen a minor in Psychology, I had accepted that yes, unfortunately I would have to endure one semester of first year statistics. I regurgitated as much as I could onto the exam paper before walking out and promptly forgetting everything. As I continued through my psych minor, I fudged and guessed my way through any statistics part of my essays and hoped no one would notice.

I was one of those people who bitched and moaned about mathematics, who claimed it had no use beyond the basics, who behaved like I had some kind of number-based dyslexia (which is actually a thing by the way, but I don’t have it). But the reality, of course, is that I have used maths every day of my life. The day I bought that pink love heart necklace I would have mentally calculated if I had enough money to cover it, would have thought about how long I had until my bus left, or how many marks I had hopefully gotten on the exam to get the overall grade I wanted.

But now, I am enamoured with it. One semester studying this course has completely changed my mind about maths. I see now that it is a universal language, that is important, even that it can be beautiful. And I also am coming to understand why I have struggled with it for so long. The main focus of this course is on teaching maths for understanding. Not just teaching the multiplication table, but actually teaching strategies for multiplying, for making sure kids actually understand what they are doing when they multiply, or divide, or find common denominators or translate equivalent fractions. Some of my teachers taught like this, but most didn’t. So once maths got beyond the realm of basic concepts and memorising, I had zero skills in my arsenal to cope with the bigger stuff.

I think *because* I have struggled for so long with the subject, I feel really empowered to do better by my future, hypothetical students. Because I know how embarrassing it is to stand at the checkout and have no idea how much your third of the share house groceries should be, I want to make sure that no student of mine has to experience that. And because I have so drastically changed my mind on this topic, I want to empower young’uns to feel good about maths, to feel like it is just as fun as science, just as interesting as English or history. I want them to feel like that always, so that instead of struggling through maths education, they’ll flourish. I want to give students the most positive maths foundation possible, so that they can be much, much better at it than I ever will be.

Ms. King out. 

Shirley Temple is a Star!

Shirley Temple is a star!

S! T! A! R!

She can do the rumble,

She can do the twist,

She can do anything just like this!

Girls do a curtsey,

Boys take a bow.

Boys go *kiss* *kiss*,

Girls go WOO!

Girl readers in particular possibly remember chanting this in primary school. There were moves too. Do you remember them? I have a vivid image in my mind of three girls standing on one of the metal benches near the oval (you had to do it out of sight of the teachers, see). I’ve forgotten how the moves at the start go, but in my memory, the girls do a curtsey, just like the song says, and then bow low. They come up to blow two quick kisses, and the jump off the bench whilst simultaneously throwing their skirts up high and flashing their knickers.

Within the rhyme scheme, I think that “woo” should probably be a “wow”, but we always said “woo!” when we jumped. I also remember performing this for our male classmates. It was a big deal, it was hilarious, it was risqué. We were literally working up to flashing our undies at unsuspecting boys. And when we did they usually ran away. This counted as playground entertainment in the early to mid 90’s you see; we didn’t have the internet or phones. Hell, tazos and tamagotchis were still years off.

It’s kind of fucked up, though and I can’t stop thinking about it at the moment. Those last two lines in particular. Boys go *kiss* *kiss*, girls go woo. Boys throw some kisses around and girls lift their skirts. Boys press the right button and girls will let them in. Is it an equation, boy kisses go in, exposed undies come out? Or just a statement of fact re gender roles? Boys make the first move, girls then put out? I know it’s a stupid kids’ song, but doesn’t that make it worse? If it’s not to be taken too seriously, why do the lyrics have such serious connotations?

I can’t pinpoint for you the moment I became a feminist, it’s been a gradual process, and I’ve only been properly aware of it for the last 18 months or so. When I was 6, I thought that song was silly, and a bit scary, and it made me slightly uneasy, I think. But I didn’t for a second think about what it meant, I just accepted it as normal, just a song we sang. I don’t know that I even knew who Shirley Temple was, I just knew it was the name of a delicious mocktail my mum bought me once.

Another thing I readily accepted as a child, but find bizarre now; almost all my teddies were male. I had one female teddy that my aunty made from a floral patterned material. Flowers obviously equalled girl, so I named her after my aunty. The other teddy she made used a red fabric, and I named him Red Bear (I’ve always been very creative). I can’t think of another soft toy that wasn’t a boy in my imagining.

I actively sort out male things; I liked them, which is fine. I liked Tonka trucks and digging in my sandpit, I liked Lego and building things with my wooden blocks. Even when I went through a Barbie phase, my favourite thing was my Barbie car. Oh yes, there was a Barbie phase, but it lasted a very short time and then… here’s the kicker, I was ashamed of it. I am *all* for kids playing with non-stereotypical toys, but why was I ashamed of my stereotypical phase? I got rid of those Barbies faster than you could rip off one of the Barbie dresses, but not before mutilating a few of those plastic beauties. If you want to look at this metaphorically, I literally pulled the head off stereotypical femininity before going back to trucks and pretending my lapse into girl-ness never happened.

I thought girl stuff was stupid, I identified as a tomboy, I didn’t want girl toys because I thought girls were crap. I had a lot of female friends but right through primary and high school I would often say things like “I much prefer the company of the boys”, “I don’t fit in with the girls”, “girls are so screechy and stupid”. Why did I hate women? How did I reconcile this within my own identity as a woman? I’m still working some of that out, and I do wonder if my own self-worth was damaged by these beliefs (it must have been, surely?). What I do know is that I don’t regret any of this. I am not ashamed. I’m not sure I could be the feminist I am today if I hadn’t had to teach myself how to not hate women first.

The other night I had a lovely conversation with two female friends about how we are all only just now discovering make up. All three of us identified as being not particularly “girly” during the phase of our lives where many girls learn how to apply make up, do their hair and dress themselves well. And now all three of us are discovering things like how to make our eyelashes curly, what lipstick colour suits us, or what kind of clothes look nicest on us. While it would have been nice to learn this sort of stuff years ago, maybe, there is a certain empowering feeling, actively seeking out this kind of lady knowledge now, as an adult. It feels like something I am doing, not something that is being forced upon me. I’m not, by any means saying that women who have had their face and hair shit together since they were teenagers are not empowered, or not feminists, just that it’s working for me. I am working it. It is a part of my feminism, and I love it.

And if I could go back in time and stop my younger self from performing the Shirley Temple song, I wouldn’t. Because my younger self enjoyed it, she got a thrill out of it, but most importantly it made her feel a bit weird. And that little niggling feeling has been burrowing inside me since the very first time I watched three girls jumping off a bench with their skirts in the air. That little feeling stayed with me through all these years, it has manifested in strange and interesting and complicated ways, and though I didn’t know it then, thinking that song was a bit weird was the first feminist feeling this lady brain ever had.

Epipha-map

Self Portrait - Lizzy King, 2013

Sometimes we change our minds slowly; we learn gently, and subconsciously, we may never even realise that our opinions have grown. Other times, realisation comes like a clap of thunder. We might be reading something, or sleeping, or talking with someone, and then suddenly, BAM – the light bulb cliché, the explosion of knowledge. I like to think that those moments are a good way to map our development as humans. So here’s my epipha-map.

Epiphany Number 1: not all families are the same.

In grade 1 or 2 I went to my first sleep over at a friend’s house. I remember my mum telling me I had to wear knickers to bed. I never wore knickers with my pyjamas (secretly, I probably didn’t start doing so till I was a teenager) and I remember being quite weirded out by this change in my sleeping attire. But that wasn’t the epiphany. Sitting at the dinner table with this nuclear family of four, it occurred to my small brain that it was actually probably a bit weird that I called my dad Tony and that he did most of the cooking. And I remember not liking my friend’s dad because he had a moustache and liked his lawn more than he seemed to like his family. My mum did all the garden work, and I actually sort of had it in my head that mums were outside people in my world and dads were really good at making cheesy cauliflower. And in that moment I realised that not everyone was like us (awesome).

Epiphany Number 2: Fractions and decimals are the same thing.

I was quite a clever kid. I was good at most subjects at school without even really trying. I was a very good reader, I liked writing and science things the best, but I also was pretty good at maths too. Until I was about 10. And then suddenly, maths got hard. I struggled intensely with anything that combined letters and numbers: 3 + x = 7?! How can an x be in there?! Xs are for words, not maths. The whole thing baffled and upset me. In particular, I could not cope with fractions. I got my head around decimals ok, but spent hours freaking out about fractions. And then my mum spent a day baking with me. We measured things out with measuring cups, and she patiently explained how 1/4 + 1/4 could equal 1/2. And I got it. I was happy. The next day at school we were working on some maths problems and I had a little “oh!” moment as I realised that 0.25 + 0.25 = 0.5 as well. They were the same thing. All this time, they were the same bloody thing. I felt like a genius idiot.

Epiphany Number 3: Belief isn’t fact.

On school camp, some of the girls were reading out horoscopes from a magazine and asked me what mine was. I went on a small rant about the ridiculousness of the belief that somehow rocks in space could tell us anything about our little mundane lives. Basically, I killed the fun. My atheist friend looked up from the magazine and said, “you know Lizzy, the way you feel about horoscopes, that’s the way I feel about Christianity”. I was pretty pissed and stomped off, I guess not because she’d said it, but because she’d called me out. I was religious at the time, but that moment was one of the first times I deigned to consider other people’s beliefs as in any way legitimate. Not that I suddenly thought horoscopes made any sense (they make none, to be clear), but in that one sentence, my friend had made me realise that all belief is kind of ridiculous, and it doesn’t hurt to be a little bit respectful. (If you’re reading this, Hilde, I give you permission to gloat).

Epiphany Number 4: I’m not a Catholic.

On the subject of religion, I started doubting and questioning my faith around the age of 16. At the end of the school year I went overseas with my choir, and we sang in amazing places across Europe. We sang a church service in a Catholic cathedral and it was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. We were told that only those who were Catholic were allowed to leave the singing to take Communion. So I dramatically stepped out from my 75 fellow singers, along with 3 or so other students and walked the length of the cathedral to get my bread and wine in the fanciest setting possible. And swallowing it was like swallowing chalk and acid. As I walked back to place I realised I’d done it to be different, to be interesting, for fun and I vowed never to take Communion again unless I was sure it was what I wanted. I’ve not touched it to this day.

Epiphany Number 5: Pride and Prejudice.

The themes are in the fucking title. Right there, on the goddamn cover.

Epiphany Number 6: It’s not them it’s me.

In 2009 I got quite sad. And anxious. And stressed. I was depressed at the end of high school too, but this was a whole new ball game. I sort of felt like I wasn’t allowed to call myself depressed because I knew people who’d battled depression for years, and mine came on quite suddenly. In the space of a few weeks I went from being pretty happy and ok to locking myself in my room, not eating, hurting myself, being in a constant state of panic. I probably would not have sort help had it not been for the paranoia. I had an overwhelming sensation that people, all people, everywhere, were looking at me. I knew, logically, that they couldn’t be, but empirically, evidence that I was seeing with my own eyes was that they were. So I went to a psychologist. It was three or so weeks before I got the courage to tell her people were looking at me and she said, “have you considered, Lizzy, it’s that you are looking at them?” No I had not considered this, I admitted. She told me to practise not making eye contact for a whole day, and see if this fixed the problem. I walked out of her office and up the street and instantly realised I was making eye contact with people. So I stopped. It was excessively difficult, I had been the one freaking other people out all along. I genuinely skipped home with happiness. While the battle for my happiness took a lot more than a quick fix realisation, this epiphany helped me so much, that I honestly don’t know how I would have survived without it.

Epiphany Number 7: I can’t run out of inspiration.

Almost every time I sit down to write a blog, I don’t know what I’m going to write about. And it’s becoming a problematic fear. I won’t go near my computer for hours, I’ll dawdle and procrastinate and ask people what I should say and read a book and hope it’ll go away. And then every time, without fail, I’ll open a word document with a blank mind and suddenly find something to write about. Like just now, when I had an epiphany about epiphanies, and started telling you about it. There’s always going to be stuff in my brain and as long as people keep reading (and even if they don’t), I’m going to keep writing it down.

Ever had an epiphany? Tell me about it via comment, facebook, twitter, carrier pigeon.

Lizzy King, Human - A Study. Tour!

Europe Tour

Life Advice

I think by now it has been pretty well documented that I like to hoard. So it should come as no surprise to you that I have kept one box for each of the two overseas trips I have undertaken in my life. So these are extra boxes, boxes in excess of the annual boxes. Today’s blog comes to you care of a box marked “Tour. Dec 2004 – Jan 2005”. It contains travel documents and tourist brochures, mementos and weird shit I picked up along the way.

I was very privileged to be a member of the St Peters Chorale. Much more than a school choir, the chorale has recorded and performed music all over the world, and in late 2004 it was our turn. I got a casual job more than a year beforehand and saved up the majority of the cost of the trip, something I was and am very proud of. We spent 4 weeks travelling through England, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Switzerland. We performed to 10 people in some places, 100s in others and notably, to about 1500 in Poland where we were also broadcast on TV. It was an amazing trip, and this box provides a small glimpse into what 16-year-old Lizzy thought about it all. (Actually this is a really weird snapshot and doesn't even really begin to cover half of what we did, a fraction of what I felt or a smidgeon of how important this trip was but anyway, it's good).

Items – Fanta bottles – 2005

It’s always exciting, I think, when you go to a new place and things are the same but different. Here we have a mango flavoured Fanta with not-so-mango colours and a “Vadmalna” flavoured Fanta. I’ve googled it but I can’t find a translation that tells me what flavour that is. I’d love to assume “grape” going by the colours, but with the mango colours as an example, we may never know. The best/grossest part? They still kinda smell like Fanta.

Item – City Info Guide to Wien – 2005

We know Wien as Vienna. There’s a lot of great stuff to see and do in Vienna, and I have a distinct memory of the snow being kind of like little perfectly round balls, like tiny beanbag beans. Please note the sticker advertising the Toilet of Modern Art - that was a cool place. And the art was good too.

Item – Brochure and Ticket to the Salt Mine – 2005

Oh my god, if you EVER go to Europe, promise me you’ll go to the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland. It’s a bit scary if like me you are claustrophobic, but ultimately the awe and wonderment you feel vastly outweighs any fear. It’s a giant, underground museum, and the walls are made of salt. The tour guides carry lemons with them in case anyone brings their own tequila, true fact. There’s a massive cathedral carved out of the salt down there, and the salt has been so beautifully polished, it looks like marble. Just fucking go, alright?

Item – Terrifying Kinder child – 2005

The Aryan ideals live on in this child.

If "Kinder" means child, is Kinder Chocolate made from Children?

Item – Post-it Notes from my Mum – 2004

She left these in my luggage everywhere. She’s the best.

She even wrote a love note in the waistband of my jeans

Letters – from my ex-boyfriend – 2005

Ah, I won’t go into too much detail here because I haven’t gotten permission from all parties involved but basically, I was in one relationship when I left for Europe and another when I returned. It was one of those unfortunate situations where I didn’t really want to be in relationship 1 when we left, but I couldn’t very well break up with him at Christmas time and right before we went away together, and I didn’t think that relationship 2 would ever happen. And then relationship 2 looked quite feasible and relationship 1 was really quite unhappy, so I just casually thought it would be a good idea to pull a switcheroo while we were as far from home as it was possible to be, surrounded by other teenagers and on strict behavioural instructions. It’s got to be right up there with one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done*. The letters range from being exceedingly angry to fairly forgiving, epitomising, I think, how strange it was to play out big emotional changes while in a sort of suspended reality – a reality where we could be arguing in the snow, then singing in a concert 20 minutes later and laughing on the bus an hour after that.

* Though in saying that, relationship 2 went quite well for quite a long time afterwards and the boy from relationship 1 did some pretty fucked up shit later on so… I don’t know what I’m trying to say here, I should stop trying to find absolution for shit 16-year-old Lizzy did.

Item – Fudge Kitchen Wrapper – 2004

Yes! Jim’s fudge kitchen! This was a place in England that made some of the best damn fudge I have ever tasted. And they made it all right there in the shop. 

A bunch of people from the tour asked to see Jim (presumably to thank him for his delicious fudge) and the guy behind the counter said, “ah… Jim’s kinda like Yoda” ... “in that he doesn’t exist”.

Item – Crystal Worlds Brochure – 2005

Is this not the most terrifying face you’ve ever seen? Even more terrifying than Kinder child? I saw this face in real life. Nothing can really prepare you for how weird the Swarovski Crystal World is.

And extensive counselling can't make you forget

Item – Arty sugar packets containing what is now almost 8 year old sugar – 2005

Gross.

Totes put them back in the box