A hundred moments in autism - Maths

Autists get into trouble. We don’t mean to, but we can be  too honest, too abrupt, say the wrong thing, or, all too often for no reason whatever.

From a very early age I got into trouble and became adept at thinking my way out of trouble.

It started with maths. Like the classic autist, I was exceptionally good at maths. As a child I had very quick mental arithmetic, my older brother would set me a multiplication question (e.g. 76 X 119) and he would try to find the answer using a calculator before I could come up with the answer in my head. I usually won these challenges.  

But my mathematical gift got me into trouble. This was in primary school. We were, the teacher announced, going to learn multiplication, an unfeasibly long word. The teacher very quickly sped through an explanation of what multiplication was and how to do it. In total it took less than a minute, she wasn't interested in teaching us multiplication, as I soon found out. She quickly progressed to her pride and joy, the times table.

We were made to memorise every sum between the numbers 1 to 12. 'One times one is one', 'two times one is two', etc, all the way up to '12 times 12 is 144'. For months and months every lesson would simply involve thirty children trying to memorise numbers, and being tested on it. It was an astonishingly stupid waste of time, months and months of our teaching time lost on the pointless task. The teacher never made any attempt at all to teach us multiplication, the method wasn't mentioned again after that initial 30-second whizz through.  The pupils were simply expected to memorise the answers to specific sums, assumedly based on the assumption that they would never ever encounter any sum involving numbers greater than twelve.

The three months we spent on this were absolute hell for me. Because, rapid though the explanation had been, I had understood the principle at the 30-second whizz through and quickly worked through the 144 sums on the wall (all 144 sums involving numbers 1-12 had been written up on an entire wall of the classroom. We literally lived in the times table, as well as dedicated our lives to it).

My teacher soon worked out that I was 'cheating' and actually doing multiplication. I would answer the questions "too quickly". She tried to catch me out one time. "What is 12 X 13?" she asked me.  "I don't know," I lied. "We only go up to 12 X 12, which is 144. I guess you'd have to add another 12 to 144."

 I was five years old, and already learning to master the complex subterfuge necessary for an autist to survive in a neurotypical world.

The teacher was furious with me, but couldn't say it out loud.  The class wasn't actually banned from learning multiplication, I had simply broken an unwritten rule. For an autist this is something you do each an every day, cause offence to a neurotypical for absolutely no sensible reason, almost always for something you’re completely oblivious of.