In my grouchier moments (one of which I am having right now), I am considering a public relations campaign to make fun of people who can't do simple math and shame them into either acquiring some fundamental skills or staying quiet and not bothering the rest of us with their ignorance.
I've devoted a significant part of my career to education: working with K-12 teachers, teaching at a university, developing programs for the public. I'm beginning to wonder whether we are not all just wasting our time and we would do much better to focus on developing an elite cadre of high-powered science literate researchers who will discover wondrous things and save us all from ourselves. Of course, that won't work because the people who know the science will be prevented from fulfilling this task by the science-ignorant who comprise the public, as well as the executive and legislative branches of the government.
I'm tired of hearing from people how hard math is. Do you ever hear people saying things like "oh, yeah, reading. I was just never good at that." Admitting that you are illiterate is harder than admitting that you are an alcoholic or a drug addict at this point. But admitting that you can't do math - well pfftt, I could never do math either, so that's just OK.
The truth is that most people don't want to be bothered, just like most people would rather state their opinion about things without wasting time looking up the facts. The NASCAR race I'm watching features the AT&T ‘Fastest Pit Crew of the Year Award’. Fans VOTE for the fastest pit crew. The last I looked, time is not subject to human opinion. Sure AT&T donates $20,000 at the end of the program to a deserving charity. But how silly do you have to be to think that 'fastest' has anything to do with your opinion? How about sponsoring something mathematically meaningful, like showing us a histogram of all the pit stop times, showing who was exceptionally fast or slow.
ADDITION: Anonymous Coward noted in the comments below that there could be different definitions of fastest. I should have given more information. The contest is per race and the voters are given no information about either what 'fastest' means or numerical information as to the pit times. I'd have no problem if they just switched it to "most valuable" because -- as you point out -- people can make their own interpretation of what is most valuable. Perhaps it is because I am a physicist: In my mind, "fastest" is a pretty precise term. Thanks for the comment!
A Dallas Morning News article on September 15th about dove hunting contained the following in an article by one Ray Sasser.
Remember your old geometry lesson about the long side of a triangle being equal to the two shorter sides. That means a dove 40 yards out and 10 yards high is 50 yards from the gun and clearly out of range. -- Dallas Morning News
Umm... No. Even if you don't remember the formula, just draw the picture. Or, God forbid, use some common sense. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right? If you had to walk 40 feet East and 10 feet North, but you had the option to walk directly th ere, wouldn't you just intuitively know that it was shorter to take the direct route? (Yeah, those ought to be 'yds' not 'ft' in the drawing, but I am in the middle of moving and trying to do this in a big ol' hurry.)
Apparently not if you work at the Dallas Morning News. The point of the DMN article was that people shouldn't try to kill things that are out of their accurate shooting range. Shooting something incompletely is worse than shooting it dead, as the injured animal generally dies an agonizing death a few hours or days later.
I realize this is the state that thinks that history textbooks have a pro-Islamic slant, and that creationism should be taught in science class; however, I am confident that there is nothing in the Bible that casts doubt on the validity of the Pythagorean theorem. That's it on the right, where d is the distance to the shooting target. The distance to the target is 41.2 yards, not 50 yards. (Thanks to Brian for pointing out my error in units.)
I don't think I'm being too demanding. This is pretty simple math. Squares and square roots are not beyond the ken of ANYONE who wants to understand them.
And that, unfortunately, seems to be the crux of the problem. I know plenty of people who can calculate how much the 40% off sweater on sale at Neiman Marcus will cost, but claim that things like mortgages or interest on their bank account are just too hard to understand. If you don't understand percentages (and compounding), perhaps you shouldn't be allowed to take out a mortgage. (I know, not feasible because it would lead to another financial crisis.)
Maybe we need to start applying intense social pressure to science and math illiterates. What we really need is branding. Let's recruit personalities from the fields of music, acting and sports who are willing to stand up for math and science. Great advertising opportunity: "If Paris Hilton can understand it, certainly YOU can."
Or maybe I've just been watching too much television lately.
"Learning something, no matter how complex, isn't hard when you have a reason to know it" Homer Hickman, Jr. (from the book Rocket Boys).
We have to give these children a reason to want to learn it. Show them it is fun, exciting, and interesting. Most importantly, make them believe they are capable.
I agree we are in so much trouble right now and it is our children who will suffer the most. But it is our fault and we need to fix it fast.
Posted by: Tina S. | September 29, 2010 at 12:21 PM
Well this might have been an interesting blog but apparently the contributors are more interested in making bigoted comments about against the state of Texas than actually clarifying a math or science issue. Texas is a leading state with regard to engineers - from petroleum engineers to civil engineers to electrical engineers. Of course, there is a substantial number of scientists and engineers in Clear Lake that work with NASA. In addition, there is something called The Medical Center in Houston, that is a huge medical complex if you haven't heard of it that has some of the most advanced medical research in the world. And of course Austin is filled with people that have advanced degrees in every field. So there is actually a huge complex of engineers, scientists, physicists, and medical doctors in Texas, as well as the academic system necessary to support it.
As far as the article you quoted, I bet if you took the time to investigate it instead of making snarky comments, you would find it was most likely written by a liberal with a journalism degree, who finds logic and math to be too logocentric or even phalocentric (if he/she had the right liberal or feminist professors). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the journalist wasn't even from Dallas or Texas.
Now I don't know if you go around proofing the New York Times or the LA Times, but if you do I hope you don't generalize from the idiocy of the journalistic class as evidenced in many newspapers to the cities that happen to endure them. To do so would be irrational and a misapplication of simple logic. And you wouldn't want to be guilt of that would you?
Posted by: jeff maylor | September 29, 2010 at 07:00 PM
Addendum to my previous comment.
Another aspect of using computer resources is given by Sugata Mitra at:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
If he is right then perhaps, along with the other web sites I listed, we are working our way to a computerized Moore Method for elementary and high schoolers?
Posted by: Jim Cliborn | September 29, 2010 at 09:59 PM
Maybe it would help if, when a child in school gets a problem wrong, teachers didn't just put a big X next to it and then move on to the next thing.
How about just putting a question mark next to the bits that are wrong and handing it back to the student? That combined with a more collaborative learning environment might work wonders.
Practice in figuring out how to get from incorrect to correct is at the core of maths.
Posted by: Bob | October 01, 2010 at 05:09 PM
I made the comment to my Pre-Calculus students that there should be a requirement to understand rates before being able to get one's driver's license. This came after a couple of the students could not understand how someone who drives for 30 minutes at 60 mph will have traveled 30 miles. With this additional part of the licensing process we would either have a more "math literate" society or a much greener society with a lot of people having to walk.
Posted by: justanothermathteacher | October 03, 2010 at 09:09 AM
You might have mentioned the fact that a two year old who can toss a ball into a trash can has the capability to calculate extremely complex ballistics on the fly that would take you days to scratch out on a pad. Now there's the irony... Get off your high-horse. There are plenty of people with talents you do not have and will never, ever possess, like walking and chewing gum simultaneously. And lay off Texans. There are idiots in every state of the union and in every country on the planet. You are smarter than this.
Posted by: J Jager | October 13, 2010 at 05:04 PM
I have a friend who is a writer. She was working on a history curriculum for fifth grade students and, because of the squirrely educational requirements these days, her history class needed to include a math lesson. So she wrote one, although she professes to be "hopeless at math." Then she sent the math lesson to me and asked me to double-check her answers to be sure they were correct!
This is an intelligent woman with a Masters degree! (I have a BA in English, btw.) She's not a best-selling author, but she's been published. Somehow she has avoided bankruptcy and IRS audits. But designing a few simple questions for fifth graders that used numbers seemed to flummox her! I was near despair. Thankfully she did get the right answers, else I might have given up hope.
I'm inclined to agree with FrauTech's comment: people have allowed themselves to be intimidated by mathematics, even simple arithmetic. Looking back, I am grateful that my Dad introduced me to baseball when I was nine years old, and taught me to calculate batting averages and even earned run averages soon after. By the time somebody told me that I was supposed to be afraid of math because I'm a girl, I'd gotten pretty good at it.
Posted by: Karen5Lund | November 02, 2010 at 05:16 PM
Agreed that people allow themselves to be overly intimidated by math. But like your friend, I would have asked someone to double check too, especially if it was for a class. Strikes me more as being careful.
Posted by: Jennifer Ouellette | November 02, 2010 at 11:29 PM