Rishi's love of joyless maths has taken me back to the trauma of the classroom - Susan Morrison

Rishi looks like the sort of boy who sat cheerfully at the front during double maths, so no wonder he thinks all English school kids should study it ‘till they are 18. He probably thinks it was fun. Maths is not fun, never has been.

I loathed it, possibly because virtually all my maths teachers were screaming maniacs who couldn’t understand why we couldn't understand that if Y=19 and X=23 when E is a variable of a prime number and Z is a fraction of 210, the answer must be “YES, MORRISON??? WHAT IS THE ANSWER?” Sorry, PTSD flashback there.

To be fair, most of my teachers in the late 1970’s seemed mildly bonkers and borderline violent. We feared no playground bully when teachers regarded verbal denigration of pupils as a must-have skill. The accurate hurling of a blackboard wiper was deemed an advantage for an ambitious teacher back then.

One teacher at our school was famous for taking down a 5th year lad out over 200 yards at a run, whilst calling him ‘an odious little cretin’. Multitasking, there.

French teachers were bitter and twisted with a reputation for smoking Gauloises. Mr Henderson reeked like a down-at-heel Parisian bistro. Years later, I realised that these teachers had studied for at least a year in France, then came home to 1970’s Scotland.

Miss Fergusson had lived in Antibes. We’d never been, but we had seen The Persuaders, where Roger Moore regularly flexed his eyebrow at bikini-clad lovelies as they sashayed along beside the glittering Mediterranean. Troon it was not.

She was given to wafting about in scarves, using the word chic and gazing dreamily out of the window whilst the class ran riot. I suspect now she was trying to see past the coal bings of the Central Belt to the sun-drenched Côte d'Azur.

My class did German. Miss Baxter had spent two years in Frankfurt and came back with the grim Teutonic personality of a Checkpoint Charlie East Berlin border guard.

Maths was never fun and is hardly the most useful subject, writes Susan Morrison.

P.E. teachers were the labrador puppies of the school, given to boundless enthusiasm and able to spot fake signatures on forged letters from your ‘mum’. They carried whistles and were obsessed with team games. They made me play hockey once. I got sent off after 12 minutes for ‘unnecessary roughness’ which I don’t think is actually in the rule book, and I considered unfair. I was shorter than everyone else playing. Those teachers armed me. That stick was just me levelling my playing field.

Science teachers were rather jolly and oddly out of this world. One of our chemistry teachers was delighted when an experiment went wrong and he electrocuted himself. He wasn’t hurt, but his hair stood on end for hours.

Why has Rishi settled on maths? It's not the most useful subject, not by a long chalk. Cooking. That’s useful. We called it domestic science back then and the teachers were terrifying. I got thrown out for blowing up the cooker. My macaroni cheese went wrong. But at least I learned why you should never put bicarbonate of soda into a pasta dish.

Let's teach kids how to handle money and food. That’s pretty much it. And you don’t need maths for that.