Math or Maths?

Do you say "math" or "maths"? I always believed that us Brits said "Maths" and almost everyone else said "Math". If I hear someone say "she has math homework..." or "he's a math teacher" it grates on my ear. I'm wrong though. I've looked it up everywhere and it's definitely "math". 

It sounds ridiculous to me ... but as it's correct, and as I'm supposed to have some small grasp of the English language, I'll use "math".

What brings me to the subject of math (I whispered the 's'), is that I've read a few articles lately about writers who fell in love with the English language and literature thanks to great teachers. 

I thought of my own teachers and drew a blank. I loved literature long before teachers crammed Shakespeare, Wordsworth and - worst of all - Chaucer down my throat. 

If there's one teacher who helped me on the route to becoming an author, it's probably my math teacher. He'd just celebrated his one hundred and thirty-fifth birthday. He believed that teaching girls anything was a waste of his time because their role in life was to keep house and take care of the men who were out battling with calculus. And he called me "poppet". I know, I know. 

He would sternly admonish the boys for making a dog's dinner of their homework, then pat the girls on the head for trying. I rarely tried and was highly inventive in reasons why my homework couldn't be done or had been done but had been eaten by the dog, lost in a flood or consumed by a plague of locusts. (A fiction writer in the making?)

Sometimes, I'd squirt ink from my fountain pen all over my hands, tell him my pen was broken and that I needed to go and wash my hands. "Off you go, poppet," he'd say. If he ever thought forty minutes was a long time to wash a bit of ink off, he never said. Mostly, though, I indulged my passion for daydreaming. While he droned on about logarithmic scales, I gazed out of the window and dreamed of faraway lands, of romance and passion (my view took in the rugby pitch), of murder and mayhem. Who knows? If I'd been able to grasp what a logarithmic scale actually was maybe I wouldn't be sitting here now making up stories...

Since leaving school, I've met many teachers and every one has been keen, enthusiastic and determined to share their passion for their subject with their students. Did you have teachers like that? Or, like me, did you have teachers who made you long to do something more exciting, like watch the grass grow?

And tell me this. Do you say "math" or "maths"?

© Shirley Wells 2016