Technologically Skwair ▢ blog
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Print by Marian Hardey. We Are All Squares. March 2020.
Print, Gaudy Math, Mariann Hardey, 2025
Let’s be honest about the terror. It is a specific, cold-sweat kind of fear. It isn’t the anxiety of a keynote speech or a grant application deadline. It is the fear of standing in front of 9 and 10-year-olds, chalk in hand (or whiteboard marker, let’s be modern), and being asked: “What is 7 times 8?” I am a Professor. I research the intersection of technology and society. I navigate complex academic landscapes for a living. But I am also Autistic and Dyslexic. And to my brain, the times tables are not a logical sequence of numbers; they are a slippery, chaotic list of arbitrary facts that refuse to stay put. Trying to hold them in my short-term memory feels, as I admitted on LinkedIn recently, like trying to hold water in a sieve. So, when I agreed to go into my daughter’s class to support their math session, I knew that I wasn’t really volunteering my time or expertise (ha). I was walking back into the scene of the crime, my own unstable education. My daughter is also neurodivergent, so this mission was deeply personal. I needed to show her, and her classmates, that math isn't just "short-term memory junk." I needed to prove that you can be bad at memorising but brilliant at thinking, or at least getting to a point where you can work things out. During the session, I introduced a specific activity called "Numbers in a Detective Story." We focused on a challenging multiplication table and turned it into a mystery to be solved. Each number became a character, and together we crafted a story to uncover how they interacted, much like uncovering clues in a detective novel. My group’s imagination far surpassed my own here, and we nearly ran out of time to complete the mystery of ‘The Four’ for the 4 times table. This approach helped bring down the stress of the multiplication process. In our group, math was a character in a story we controlled and were telling. Not scary. Funny and silly. Return to Shrewsbury In Dorothy L. Sayers’ masterpiece Gaudy Night, the protagonist Harriet Vane returns to her Oxford college. She walks the cloisters haunted by the ghost of her own reputation and confronts a "Poison Pen". In Sayers's story, a malicious force sends anonymous letters that target the scholars' deepest insecurities. The letters whisper: You are a fraud. You are unlovable. You do not belong. For the neurodivergent learner, Rote Memorisation is our Poison Pen. And she is dipped in malevolence. A malicious voice in the back of the classroom that conflates "speed" with "intelligence." It tells the child who needs to count on their fingers that they are slow. That they should not do so. It tells the dyslexic student that, because they cannot sequence numbers in a list, they cannot understand the beauty of mathematics. It is a fundamental betrayal of intellectual integrity. [Age, eight years young, I was told I was “cheating” using my fingers to work out the nine times tables] Standing to the side of the classroom this week, I felt the phantom weight of those accusations. But as Sayers’ hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, famously argues, the only antidote to the chaos of emotion is the clarity of truth. Or, rather, we needed to stop feeling bad about the numbers and start seeing the truth of them. The Audacity of the Amateur Sleuth And here, I must pause to acknowledge the sheer, breathtaking audacity of my own position. Who the hell do I think I am? I am a creature of the Ivory Tower, a dweller in the abstract lands of Higher Education, where we debate the ethics of AI over double espressos. I have attended fleeting sessions in a primary school classroom. I am a pedagogical tourist, wandering into a country where I do not speak the language, a land of carpet time and glue sticks, pointing at the local customs and saying, “I think you’ll find there is a better way to do that.” To the hardworking primary teachers who navigate this reality every day: I know how this looks. It looks like the Lady of the Manor is swooping in to tell the gardeners how to hold a spade. The tragedy is not that teachers don't see the problem. Many of them smell the rot just as clearly as I do. They know that rote memorisation is failing not only their neurodivergent students. We (parents and teachers) are trapped in the 'closed circle', bound by the machinery of the curriculum, the schedule, and the looming oversight of OFSTED. It is very difficult for teachers and support staff to have space to open themselves up to vulnerability because authority in a primary classroom is a fragile currency. But perhaps that is exactly why my silly intervention worked. In Gaudy Night, Harriet Vane is useful precisely because she is an outsider; she is not beholden to the Senior Common Room. She can ask the dangerous questions because she doesn't have to live with the consequences of the answer in the same way. My "audacity" stems from the specific freedom of the consulting detective. I could sweep in - festive jumper and all - as a safe, temporary disruption. I could afford to be "rubbish" at maths because my role does not depend on the outcome of the investigation. I could be the one to call a halt to the proceedings because I wasn't the one responsible for filing the paperwork the next morning. I saw the "Poison Pen" of rote learning not as a necessary evil, but as a hostile actor. Sometimes, it takes an outsider to spot the evidence hidden in plain sight, simply because the local force is too exhausted by the procedural drudgery to look up from the case files. The Detective Work I did not go into that room armed with flashcards. I went armed with evidence. I crowdsourced the collective intelligence of my network to find the patterns hidden beneath the rote drills. The response was a vindication of the human mind over the mechanical method.
The Machine Cannot Hold You Safely in Failure This brings me back to the argument I posited in my previous post: that technology cannot replace the "chair by the fire." If I had walked into that classroom with a suite of iPads running "MathBlaster 3000," the room might have been quieter. The children might have been seen to be “engaged," their faces bathed in the blue light of individual screens. But they would have been engaged in a closed loop of stimulus and response, a hermetic seal where the child struggles alone against the algorithm. I see this same tableau in my own lecture halls: students glued to laptops, ostensibly "capturing" the knowledge, yet profoundly unaware of the connection to learning happening in the actual room. They are present, yet absent; documenting the event without experiencing it. The Poison Pen of the Algorithm In Gaudy Night, the villain is the "Poison Pen", an anonymous force that targets the insecurities of the women scholars, whispering that they are unloved, unwanted, and out of place. For the neurodivergent learner, the gamified math app is our modern Poison Pen. It does not sign its name, but its message is clear. An app does not care why you got the answer wrong. It demands performance, not understanding. It mandates hyperfocus on getting everything correct. Not supporting failure as a route to learning. Any app/AI reinforces the binary of Success and Failure, with the red cross or the green tick, leaving no space for the messy, beautiful middle ground where learning actually happens. Harriet Vane spends much of Gaudy Night defending the "intellectual integrity" of the scholar, but she eventually realizes that facts without humanity are cold comfort. A machine can possess data, but it cannot possess integrity, because it cannot care about the truth; it only cares about the output. The Pedagogy of Failure The "hacks" we explored this week were not software patches; they were cognitive bridges. But more importantly, they required a human foundation. They required me to stand there, stripped of my professorial armour, vulnerable and imperfect, and say the words that no AI will ever authentically say: “I am rubbish at this. But you are going to help me.” Imposter Syndrome has been stalking me for a long, long time. This week, the fear that I was a fraud in a room full of 9- and 10-year-olds ceased to be a weakness. It became a way through something I find completely impossible. (In case you hadn’t realised, I can’t math.) When a child sees an adult struggle, the shame of their own struggle takes on a different meaning. Not that it goes away, but it shifts away from shame or something to keep hidden. It’s ok that you can’t do something. We will work on this together! Then, the "Poison Pen" runs out of ink. The Alchemy of the 12s For our murder (I know, dark right, but this is math), we staged the mystery of the 12 times table. We deliberately turned the abstract horror of 12 times 7 into a collaborative game of addition. We split the room. I told them: "The 12 times table is scary. It’s too big. So let’s break it. We don't do 12s. We do 10s and 2s." We all liked the 10s and 2. One group became The Tens. Their job was easy, safe, and confident. 10 times 7? Seventy! They concluded. The other group became The Twos. Their job was effortless, 2 times 7? Fourteen! And then, the magic. We smashed them together. 70 + 14. The answer, 84, didn't come from a memory bank; it came from the room. It came from the collective effort of breaking a big, scary problem into small, human-sized pieces. An AI could have given them the answer in a millisecond. It could have "personalised" the learning pathway. But it could not have given them the feeling of solidarity. It could not have turned a room full of anxiety into a team of code-breakers. Plus, an AI wouldn’t know the depth of feeling around cake. This is what I mean when I say technology cannot replace the chair by the fire. The machine can verify the data, but only a human can validate the struggle. By admitting I was "rubbish," I didn't lose their respect; I gained an opening into a shared learning experience that helped me as much as it helped them. The Verdict In Gaudy Night, the resolution does not arrive with a dramatic arrest or a sudden confession. It arrives when Harriet Vane realizes that the heart and the head do not have to be at war. She understands that one can possess deep feelings and rigorous intellect simultaneously; that admitting to vulnerability does not compromise one’s authority, but rather, secures it. She discovers that the "scholarly life" is not about cold detachment, but about a passionate commitment to the truth. I walked into that classroom terrified that I would fail my daughter. I carried the heavy luggage of my own educational trauma and the specific, creeping Imposter Syndrome that haunts every neurodivergent academic, the fear that, despite the title of "Professor," I am merely one missed times-table away from being exposed as a fraud. But I left, realising that we had rewritten the rules of engagement. The Ivory Tower vs. The Carpet As practitioners in Higher Education, we often talk about "pedagogy" and "scaffolding" in the abstract air of lecture halls and policy documents. We are spending a lot of time debating the ethics of Generative AI in seminars. But there is a profound disconnect between the theoretical landscape of the University and the visceral reality of a Primary School classroom. In Higher Ed, we often hide our struggles behind citations and polished slides. We present the finished product of our intellect. But nine-year-olds are natural-born deconstructionists. They do not care about the finished product; they care about the mechanism. If I had relied on the standard tools of EdTech, the gamified apps that reward speed over comprehension, I would have failed them. Those tools are designed for the neurotypical brain that retains information like a sponge. For the neurodivergent brain, which holds information like a sieve, those tools are just another form of the "Poison Pen," reinforcing the message that if you aren't fast, you aren't smart. The Human Algorithm We proved that you don't need to have a "sticky" memory to be a mathematician. You just need to know how to hack the system. What we did with the "finger tricks" and the "doubling patterns" was not cheating. It was algorithmic thinking. We stripped the code of mathematics down to its source. We showed that 7 times £8 isn't a magic spell you have to memorise; it is a structure you can build. AI can give a student the answer to 7 times 8 in a nanosecond. It can generate a lesson plan for a teacher in ten seconds. But AI cannot model struggle. It cannot say, "I find this hard, too, so let's find a different way." When I stood there and admitted, "My brain doesn't hold these numbers," we all found that understandable. “Don’t worry, D’s mum, you will be as good as one day.” was the observation on my way out. High praise, indeed. That is the human API, the connection that allows data to actually transfer. By showing them my own "glitch," I gave them permission to have theirs. Solid Ground For my daughter and her classmates, seeing her mum- the Professor, with all the weight that character carries - using her fingers to calculate a sum was a lesson in detection. It was a demonstration of finding the clues and prioritising the evidence of the case file over the theatre of performance. References and LinksThe "Crowdsourced" Wisdom
Dedicated to the Year 5/6 class who taught me that the best way to learn is to admit you don't know.
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