It Doesn’t Always Add Up…

Mrs Tan was my maths teacher in Form 2 (Gr 8).  We were always a little bit scared of her. Okay, maybe more than a little.  She was always so fierce-looking and almost never seemed to smile.  And she was very particular about how work was to be presented and handed in.  We had two exercise books: Book A and Book B.  She would check the work in one book while we did work in the other.  Every day, we would hand in the new work and she would hand us back the corrected work from the other book.

There were ten Form 2 classes and I guess she would have taught half of them.  Each class had about 45 students, so that’s 225 students she had.  225 books to check every single day. I’d be grumpy, too.

I did well in Form 2, but can’t really remember all the topics we covered in maths that year.  All I remember is starting the year learning about the binary system: adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing binary numbers.

I don’t know why we had to learn about binary numbers.  I guess in the end there are only 10 types of people: those who end up using them, and those who don’t.