I Taught Grade Six Percentages While Owing Money to Seven Shops

The term I was given

Every year in the third term, the Grade Six classes at our school in Polokwane do a unit our head of department calls shop maths. It is percentages dressed up in real life. Discounts, VAT, simple interest, the price of a loaf of bread going up by eight percent. The children love it because the numbers have rand signs in front of them, and suddenly a fraction becomes something they can eat or wear.

I have taught that unit for eleven years. I am good at it.

What none of them knew, and what nobody at school knew, was that I owed money to seven shops. Two clothing stores, a furniture place, a cellphone contract I had upgraded twice, a jewellery account I opened for my sister's fortieth, a hardware card from when the geyser burst, and a homeware store whose card I cannot even remember applying for. On top of that, two small loans, one of them from a lender whose office is above a butchery in town, because I needed school fees for my son in a January when everything else was already stretched.

I knew how to calculate compound interest on the chalkboard in coloured chalk. I did not once, in four years, calculate it on my own life.

The question about the lay-by

It was a warm Tuesday. We were doing a worksheet about a bicycle that costs R2 400, and the problem asked what you would pay in total if you bought it over twelve months at a certain rate of interest.

A boy called Tshepo put up his hand.

"Ma'am," he said, "my mother has a lay-by for my school shoes. Is it the same as this? Does she pay more than the shoes?"

I explained that a lay-by is different, that you pay it off before you take the item home, and usually there is no interest, just a small fee sometimes. He nodded. Then he asked the second question.

"So why do people not just do lay-by for everything? Why do they do the other one?"

I stood there with a piece of yellow chalk in my hand and I did not have an answer that I could say out loud. The honest answer was: because you want the thing now. Because the lady at the counter smiles and says you qualify. Because the monthly amount looks small, and you never add up all the small amounts together.

I said something about how sometimes people need things urgently. Then I changed the subject to the next sum. That night I could not sleep.

Adding it up at the kitchen table

I did what I would have made any learner do. I wrote it all down.

I got out a hardcover exercise book, one of the spare ones from the stock room, and I ruled columns. Name of the account. Balance. Monthly instalment. Interest rate, which I had to look up for most of them because I genuinely did not know.

When I added the instalments column, it came to just under forty percent of my take-home salary. When I added the balances, it was a number I had to check three times because I thought I had put the decimal comma in the wrong place. I had not.

The thing that hurt most was not the total. It was the interest column. I teach children that a percentage is "out of a hundred." I sat there and looked at what I was paying, every month, on money I had already spent on things that were now worn through or broken or given away.

What I did not know about help

I had heard the phrases before, of course. But I had always assumed they were for people in much worse trouble than me, people whose cars were being repossessed, people who had stopped answering their phones. I was still paying everything. I had just stopped being able to breathe.

My first instinct was to borrow one more time to pay everything off at once. I spent a weekend reading about Debt consolidation, which I understood in my teacher's way as turning many fractions into one fraction with a common denominator. It made sense on paper. One instalment, one date, one rate. But I also read enough to see that it only works if the new rate is genuinely lower and if you stop using the old cards, and I was honest enough with myself to know I needed something with more structure around me than just a new loan and my own willpower.

The phone call from the staffroom

I made the first proper call in the staffroom during a free period, with the door closed and the kettle on so the noise would cover my voice. A colleague who teaches Natural Sciences, a man I will not name because he would hate it, had told me months before over a cup of rooibos that he had gone through Debt Review after his divorce, and that the worst part was the first conversation, not the process.

He was right. The first conversation was terrible. I had to say all the numbers out loud to a stranger. I had to say that I am a maths teacher, and I heard my own voice crack on the word maths.

The person on the line did not make a joke about it. She asked about my salary and my son and my rent and my transport, and she wrote everything down, the same way I had in my exercise book.

Learning to choose carefully

I did not sign anything that week. I am a teacher, I check answers. I spent several evenings reading about how the process works under the National Credit Act, what a debt counsellor is actually allowed to do, how the credit bureaus record it, and what it means that you cannot take new credit while you are under review. If you are in the same place I was, I would gently say: compare a few Debt Review Companies, ask them to explain the fees in plain language, and do not let anybody rush you while you are frightened. Fear makes a very bad calculator.

What I tell the children now

This year, when the third term came around, I taught shop maths again. I used the same bicycle problem.

But I changed one thing. At the end of the unit, I wrote a new sum on the board. It listed seven small monthly amounts, each one looking harmless, R189, R245, R310 and so on. I asked them to add them up and then work out what that total was as a percentage of an imaginary teacher's salary.

When they got the answer, the room went quiet for a moment. Then a girl in the front row said, "Ma'am, that teacher must be very tired."

I said yes. I said she was. And I said that the best thing about maths is that once you write the numbers down honestly, you can start to change them.

My exercise book is still in my bedside drawer, and I have started marking it in red: ticks for the accounts that are closing. Tshepo is in Grade Seven this year. I saw his mother at the gate last month in a pair of school shoes for his little sister, still in the box, a lay-by slip folded on top. I smiled at her and did not say anything at all.