Art Kavanagh

I’m a better than average speller, but I certainly can’t see the word on any kind of internal screen, nor can I call up the visual memory of, say, a page where I’ve previously read the word. I think I decided, very early on, that I was fed up of getting hit by the teacher (a nun) for my bad spelling and I was simply going to memorize the spellings of any words I came across that weren’t obvious, so I wouldn’t be caught out. It works pretty well. Unfortunately, the same approach doesn’t work with maths. I just can’t keep track of numbers in my head. I was good at most other subjects in school but not what we called “mental arithmetic”, much to the frustration of my mother who couldn’t understand why I didn’t just get it, particularly since I was bright in other areas. Maybe the nun we had for maths just wasn’t as heavy handed as the one we had for spelling.