Apparently, nines are the hardest to grasp for primary school children. If only they’d learned how to cheat like meMaths was never my thing. I quite enjoyed it at O-level, to the extent that I chose to do it at A-level. As early as the first week of the A-level course, however, it became abundantly clear that the subject was quite beyond me. I simply couldn’t make head or tail of what the teacher was on about.Looking around at the rest of the class quietly getting on with it, I remember wondering if there had been some primer course over the summer that everyone but me had attended. I just didn’t get it. There didn’t seem to be any certainties any more, rarely anything so straightforward as a right or wrong answer. There were enough grey areas in my other subjects – English and history. From my maths I wanted certainty, objective truth, which as far as I could see wasn’t part of it any more. Continue reading...

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/21/struggling-with-the-nine-times-table-i-have-a-failsafe-method