Sudoku might not involve the type of math found in MOE’s curriculum, but it

is

a number puzzle involving sorting, visualisation, trial-and-error, logic, and problem solving—skills also present in math lessons spent trying to make head or tail of what the everloving fuck one’s teacher/textbook was saying. Often, those familiar with Math PTSD know that anything to do with numbers inadvertently evokes said ‘trauma’ from school.

However, to understand why the popular puzzle doesn’t appear to spark similar feelings of discomfort toward math, I have to first understand the circumstances under which said feelings manifest, long after one has left school.

Take my friend, Clara, for instance.

She studied at one of the top JCs, has a rewarding writing career, and turns 30 this year. But she still feels a sense of overwhelming dread whenever she comes to the end of a meal with friends, and the table needs to split the bill.

The slip of paper invariably dredges up memories of flunking math in JC, despite having scored well for the subject during secondary school. Figuring out how much each person pays usually requires mental sums, causing her brain to shut down. (Knowing she can use a phone calculator doesn’t help ‘ease the trauma’.)

Another sufferer/survivor of Math PTSD, Cheryl, tells me her inferiority complex stems from being forced to drop Additional Mathematics in secondary school. This feeling persists, even though she graduated from secondary school 13 years ago.

“Whenever I see my math teacher on Facebook, I still feel fear and even humiliation. I also dread doing budgeting at work [so much] that I keep putting off the task. And in my personal life, I’ve been fined countless times for late payments of credit card bills,” she admits.

Finally, 26-year-old Anne is no stranger to feeling stupid because her strengths didn’t lie with math or science. She recalls being made to “stay back” in primary two because she didn’t know how to use the abacus. When she was barely eight, she already felt “very useless”.

In secondary school, Anne was allocated to what was often perceived to be the “last class” (i.e. a combined science class) because she didn’t excel at math or science, even though she had a “good overall ranking”. This class placement made students like her who didn’t excel in either subject believe their non-math and science accomplishments were comparatively insignificant.

Later on, in her university’s scholars programme, Anne took a compulsory module on quantitative statistics. The lecturer assumed everyone possessed knowledge of JC H2 math, but coming from a polytechnic course that was largely unrelated to math meant the last time she’d dealt with math was in secondary school.

“I was super stressed so I asked him for help, but he asked me to borrow a math textbook from the library. I think I only understood 1% of the practice paper prior to the exam. I totally broke down the day before the exam,” she shares.

As a result, she developed an aversion to statistics, and also quit her scholars programme eventually.

If my friends’ answers tell me anything, the ‘collective trauma’ of Math PTSD among the artistically-inclined is an all-consuming school experience whose residual effects end up shaping who we become as adults.

Some of the artistically-inclined eventually learn to embrace the chip on their shoulder. As the standard inside joke goes, “Why you do art/dance/music/media/theatre ah? Because cannot do math, is it?”

But for many others, merely talking about Sudoku’s popularity with me unwittingly reopens old wounds of having their intelligence measured against their math scores, even if it appears the puzzle itself doesn’t seem to be associated with the same vein of discrimination.