Maths Isn’t the Villain

It’s the Quiet Sidekick You’ve Been Using All Along

Maths has always carried a peculiar reputation. It’s the one subject people feel comfortable declaring defeat over, almost proudly: “I’m rubbish at maths.” You’d never hear someone say, “I can’t read, haha!” in polite conversation unless you were trying to clear a room. But dismissing maths as impossible? That’s socially acceptable small talk. It’s the adult version of saying “I don’t do numbers” while calculating exactly how many biscuits you can sneak before someone notices.

That cultural shrug is telling. It suggests that maths isn’t just a subject, it’s a villain, a bogeyman, a monster lurking in the school timetable with a protractor in one hand and a grudge in the other. And yet, the same people who claim to be hopeless with numbers will happily calculate discounts in a shop, split a restaurant bill to the penny, or mentally convert oven temperatures like they’re auditioning for Bake Off. Clearly, the problem isn’t the numbers themselves. It’s the story we’ve built around them. And possibly the trauma of long division.

The truth is that maths is cumulative. Miss one step fractions, long division, algebra and the next step feels like a foreign language spoken by robots who hate you. Researchers call this the “maths blockage”: a build-up of shaky foundations and emotional barriers that calcify over time. It’s like trying to build a treehouse on jelly.

Once you fall behind, catching up feels impossible. And because maths is unforgiving, you can’t really fudge a wrong answer with charm, the fear of failure quickly becomes self-fulfilling. Anxiety makes concentration harder, which leads to more mistakes, which deepens the anxiety. Before long, the subject isn’t just difficult. It’s terrifying. Like being asked to juggle flaming calculators while blindfolded.

What makes this worse is the emotional weight attached to maths. Neuroscientists have shown that for some learners, the brain’s pain centres light up when they anticipate solving a maths problem. That’s right: the thought of doing algebra can feel physically painful. Maths isn’t just hard, it’s a migraine in disguise.

No wonder so many people develop the “I can’t” reflex. It isn’t laziness. It’s self-protection. If your body associates maths with panic, your brain will do anything to avoid it. And yet, in daily life, we’re constantly doing maths without complaint. Cooking is ratios. Shopping is percentages. DIY is geometry. Sports stats are probability. The difference? In real life, maths feels useful. In classrooms, it often feels abstract, disconnected from reality, and wrapped in exam pressure like a sad sandwich.

This disconnect is amplified by the way maths is taught. Curricula are overloaded, teachers are under pressure to “teach to the test,” and students are rarely given time to master concepts before being pushed onto the next. It’s like trying to learn to swim while being dragged through a water slide.

The result? A backlog of confusion. Teachers burn out. Students disengage. And the myth of maths as “too hard” keeps recycling like a cursed worksheet. Worse still, low expectations creep in. In disadvantaged schools, some teachers unconsciously assume pupils won’t excel at maths, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The subject that should be a universal toolkit ends up as a gatekeeper, shutting people out of opportunities and occasionally locking the door with algebra.

And yet, maths is also playful. Strip away the baggage and its patterns, puzzles, and problem-solving things humans are naturally good at. Children instinctively look for patterns in the world: stacking blocks, spotting shapes, and counting steps. Somewhere along the way, that curiosity gets replaced with fear. Probably around the time someone said “quadratic equation” without blinking.

What if we reframed maths not as a monster to slay, but as a playground to explore? Imagine classrooms where mistakes are celebrated as experiments, where puzzles replace drills, where football stats and cooking recipes are treated as valid maths problems. Imagine if we taught not just the numbers, but the mindset: that maths is a language of patterns, not a test of intelligence. And that “show your working” doesn’t mean “expose your soul.”

The irony is that maths is everywhere in the modern world. It’s the quiet hero behind your phone, your bank account, your Spotify playlist, your satnav. It powers algorithms, economies, and engineering. Without it, the world would grind to a halt and not just because no one could figure out how to split the bill.

And yet, we’ve built a culture that treats it as an enemy. That contradiction is absurd. We rely on maths constantly, but we’ve convinced ourselves it’s beyond us. It’s like using a torch and insisting you’re afraid of light.

Not inherently. It’s cumulative, yes. It’s unforgiving if you miss steps, certainly. But at its core, it’s no harder than learning a language or mastering a sport. The difficulty lies in the way we frame it: as a gatekeeper, a punishment, a test of worth. Change the story, and the numbers start to add up differently.

The invitation, then, is simple. Stop treating maths as a monster. Start treating it as a toolkit. Stop bragging about being bad at it and start playing with it. Because maths isn’t the villain, we think it is. It’s the quiet companion we’ve been using all along in shops, in kitchens, in games, in life.

The real challenge isn’t the numbers. It’s the narrative.
And the good news? That’s something we can rewrite. Preferably with biscuits.

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