Growing up, Craig Fay develops strategies to hide how terrible he is at math.

Craig Fay is a Toronto based engineer turned stand up comedian with a “keen insight that allows him to take subjects familiar to everyone and turn them into something new and laughable” (Exclaim). He has appeared on CBC’s Laugh Out Loud, performed at the world famous Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal and is co-host of "The Villain Was Right" podcast, which recently won a Canadian Podcasting Award for Outstanding Debut For a Series. Craig’s debut comedy album “Helicopter Rich” was praised as “observational and self-reflective…worth playing multiple times over” (Exclaim) and is available now on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon and Spotify. You can follow Craig on Twitter For (@CraigFayComedy), like him on Facebook (/CraigFayComedy), or sign up for his email newsletter at CraigFay.com. Or just Google him. You’ll probably just Google him.

This story originally aired on November 8, 2019 in an episode titled “Late Diagnosis.”

Story Transcript

So one of the first memories I ever had about school was sitting in Grade 2 and we were making clocks out of paper plates and cardboard so that we could learn how to tell time. I remember this because I did not get it. I did not understand it at all. I understood how the little hand could point to the hour that was. That made perfect sense to me. I understood that the big hand pointed up that meant o’clock and if the hand pointed down that meant thirty, but everything in between it was arbitrary positions on a circle that somehow represented time and all the other kids were able to remember how those lines made up to figure out time. I did not get it.

But that was fine for me at the time because I knew that all I had to do in order to know what time it was was look at my wrist, press Garfield’s ears so that his teeth popped open, and then there would be a nice digital display there saying exactly what time it is on normal numbers. If it’s 3:47, a three, a four and a seven. We’re done. It’s 3:47 no problem. That worked out fine.

But telling time wasn’t the only thing I was bad at. That same year in school the teacher asked me to take the attendance down to the office and I somehow got lost in a school with two hallways. I got to the office and when I went to go back all the doors looked the same, all the bulletin boards looked the same and I wandered around that school for what felt like half an hour before a teacher finally found me near the gymnasium, which was nowhere near my class. And I was crying and they took me back to class.

I was also terrible with names. I couldn’t remember names. We had some family friends and they're two boys and I knew that one was older and I knew one was younger. I knew which was older and which was younger and I could tell them apart, but I could never remember which one’s name was Kyle and which one’s name was Dane. I couldn’t keep them apart. It always confused me.

About the only thing I was good at at this point in my life was writing stories. I would sit in my room and for hours, for hours at a time I would just scrawl in big, messy, slanted letters, misspelled words across blank pieces of paper mostly cheap rip-offs of movies I've seen and video games I've played. But it just poured out of me because it made perfect sense. At any point in a story you know exactly where you need to go because you know where you are. It’s just what’s happening and then and then and then until you're done. It just poured out of me.

But this one good thing I was good at was so vastly overshadowed by the fact that I was terrible at math. I was so bad at it. I had to learn addition and, like most kids, I first learned with counting on my fingers. One and two is three no problem. My problem was it never advanced past that.

So I understood in theory how if you have one apple and two apples you can put those together and you'd have more apples, but there is no inherent sense about how many that was. You'd have to count it up from scratch every single time. You can’t memorize all those numbers. That’s impossible.

So I'd always say we have one apple and one, two, put them together, one, two, three apples. No problem. I can do it from scratch every time. Not a problem. But very quickly numbers started to get a little bigger and I ran out of fingers.

So I was asked to add things together like 67 and 54 and my mind would just go blank. For whatever reason, I just couldn’t keep these numbers in my head. As soon as a new one popped in an old one would fall back out. I could maybe hold about three digits in my head at any one time. It’s sort of like I was writing on a chalk board with one hand and erasing with the other as I went. It made it impossible.

But I figured out that’s okay. That’s not a problem. What I can do is I'll just make sure I keep writing it down in the margins. As I go I'll add one column together, count it up on my fingers, carry the one, add the next column up, count it out on my fingers, and then and then and then. And it always worked. It wasn’t a problem. It was slow but it worked.

Until we got to multiplication which I far ran out of body parts to count. I couldn’t do that anymore. And I couldn’t do it in the margins. I couldn’t come up with six groups of eight in the margins or anything like that. I'd finally run up against the wall where I absolutely, just out of necessity, had to memorize 144 numbers. That’s 12 times 12, which I know now. 144 different combinations of numbers, which for a kid who can’t remember three digits is mind blowing.

But my parents wouldn’t give up on me. I would sit there after dinner and we’d sit there at the kitchen table and they do flashcards at me with all these multiplication questions on them. So they’d go, “What’s three times four”, “What’s two times eight”, “Seven times nine”. And I would do this over and over for months and months and months to the point which my younger sister, who is still learning to count, knew her multiplication tables better than I did.

But after months of that, finally, brute force ever, all of them were pounded into my head. I knew them, all except anything that multiplied to be 24. Six times four and three times eight were a mental block I could not get over for the life of me.

My parents would sit there and be like, “Okay, Craig, three times eight?” Nothing. Like, “Craig, three times eight is 24.”

“Okay.”

“Craig, what’s three times eight?” Nothing. “Craig, three times eight is 24.”

“Okay.”

“Say it with us, three times eight is 24. Three times eight is 24. Good. Craig, what’s three times eight?” Did not get it.

This is not an exaggeration by the way. This is exactly how it went.

But finally, after years and years and years, I finally got it in there, which is great. And what’s really crazy is that almost 20 years after sitting at my parents’ kitchen table failing these cards over and over and over again, I found myself sitting at a desk behind my computer working as a mechanical engineer. How did that happen?

And to be honest, I had not asked myself that question at all. I hadn’t even thought about that, what made that change, until I was sitting there at my job working as a mechanical engineer and I was taking some HR training at the time. It was about serving people with disabilities. One that said is that some people may suffer from learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dyscalculia.

I'd heard of dyslexia before, I’d never heard of dyscalculia before. So I went on Wikipedia and I looked it up and there was a list of symptoms, which is math learning disability.

Symptoms include difficulty reading time on analog clocks, difficulty with directions and orienting yourself in north forward directions, difficulty with face-name recognition, difficulty with math, basic math concepts such as addition, multiplication and mental arithmetic, as in difficulty with adding multiplication and mental arithmetic and, finally, may remember math concepts one day and forget them the next. Just like three times eight is 24, I can know one day and forget the next.

I sat there reading this list of symptoms and just my mind blown because all of a sudden, all of these quirky, individual childhood things weren’t that anymore. There was a list of symptoms that explained so much about my life. I sent this list to my dad and he was like, “Yup, that’s you.” Right?

And it’s weird because up until that point I hadn’t really thought about what had taken me from this kid that struggled with math so much to be someone who could become a mechanical engineer, a typically math-heavy field.

Then I started thinking about it and I realized nothing had actually changed. I was still that guy. You know what I mean? I wish I could sit here and tell you that there was suddenly a moment where math started making sense to me, where everything clicked and I understood it but that wouldn’t be true. To this day I struggle with remembering numbers.

When I copy out a phone number I do it two or three digits at a time because I can’t remember all of them at once. When I go to split a tab at the bar, it’s impossible especially when I've had a few drinks. And to this day I still feel as though three times eight and six times four, I know them but I feel like they live in a different part of my brain.

It’s like if anybody has ever been in a family where for some reason you keep that one item of food in a different part of the house than the kitchen, you're like, “We keep our beans in the basement.” “What?” That’s exactly what it is like. Every time I think about three times eight I feel myself going down those stairs to access that information. It’s still very hard.

And I still struggle with face-name recognition, I use GPS to get everywhere.

But then I realized what changed wasn’t me. It was math. As I progressed through school I realized that it became less and less about knowing numbers and became more and more about problem solving. Calculus and algebra were just like stories that I always used to read. It was you figured out where you were and you figured out logically where you need to go from there and then and then.

Compared to the other kids who’d always looked at a question and known the answers they never had to figure it out before. They got frustrated. They quit. Whereas for me this was the same as counting it out on my fingers, just keep going. The drudgery, the work of just solving it out.

And I realized that over the years all of these efforts I had gone in to solving the problem of me being bad at math had actually made me better at math problem solving. And they started letting me use calculators.

Thank you very much, guys.