Slashdot Mirror
Is Poor Numeracy Ruining Lives?
Hugh Pickens writes "The BBC reports on how millions of people struggle to understand a payslip or a train timetable, or pay a household bill. Government figures show that almost half the working population of England have only primary school math skills, and research suggests that weak math skills are linked with an array of poor life outcomes such as prison, unemployment, exclusion from school, poverty and long-term illness. 'We are paying for this in our science, technology and engineering industries but also in people's own ability to earn funds and manage their lives,' says Chris Humphries. He is the chairman of National Numeracy, an organization seeking to emulate the success of the National Literacy Trust, which has helped improve reading and writing standards since it was set up nearly 20 years ago. The Department for Education wants the vast majority of young people to study math up to 18 within a decade to meet the growing demand for employees with high level and intermediate math skills. 'It is simply inexcusable for anyone to say "I can't do maths,"' adds Humphries. "
If you can't multiply / divide , you can't run a business.
If you don't know anything about combinatorix (odds), you get suckered by any form of gambling, including insurance, warranties and the stock market.
If you don't understand exponential math, you can't become wealthy.
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That many people are proud of their innumeracy.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
uneducated != stupid
Don't feel bad. Doing math in your head has been replaced by calculators. Application of math is where it's at.
I know plenty of people who can do math in their head, but can't actually use it for anything outside of homework.
But you don't always have a calculator when you need one (or don't want to take the time to pull out your phone and start up the calculator app). Being able to do simple math in your head can be a huge advantage in life to do a quick sanity check on lots of things.
I recently spotted an error in some home purchase paperwork A number that was supposed to be 3% of the purchase price was actually 7%. The listing agent didn't believe me that it was wrong until she pulled out her calculator to run the numbers. It's trivial to estimate 3% of a number in your head - finding 3% of $325,000 means rounding down to $3K for 1% and multiplying by 3 to get $9K. It's not exact, but often a rough estimate is enough. I later ran all the numbers through a calculator to be sure they were exact, but I saved myself another day of waiting for corrected paperwork by having her correct it in her office instead of waiting until I got home to discover the error.
While it's true that most people have a calculator close at hand these days, how many people take the time to actually use it, especially when they think that someone else already used their calculator to calculate the numbers, so they assume it's already correct?
And I really can't believe how many people have to get a calculator to evenly add a tip and divide a lunch bill 4 ways! And then proceed to say "Ok, everyone owes $8.79" instead of just saying "$9".
It's worse than that. Today's society requires, IMHO, as part of the basic literacy, to not only know how to read and write, but to have good numeracy skills, and to have decent understanding of basic science and of issues related to applied computing -- at least as far as security, social engineering, etc. is concerned.
I think that the real issue is that things are taught in a way that separates them in the heads of the pupils. Instead of having a coherent image of science and technology, overlapping and applying to everyday experiences, the knowledge is built in an abstract way and seems to be decoupled from real life. People seem to be horribly unable to apply basic principles from grade level maths, physics, chemistry and biology to everyday life. That's why you see so many people go "dumb" when they see computers: no one taught them in a way that links computing to other knowledge they have. It's black magic to them because it was never shown to them to be otherwise; they don't understand that computers fundamentally process numbers according to fixed recipes, etc. That's why there's so much bad legislation around: the lawmakers don't have a clue how their laws relate to reality, they only see political buzzwords.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
If you have to pull out your phone, fiddle with the buttons, start up a calculator application and fiddle with the buttons again just to figure out that that the $27.50 plus 12% tax that you owe is substantially less than the $34 you were just charged, then perhaps you should just give up and expect to pay a 10% innumeracy tax on every transaction you make for the rest of your life.
Saying "But I have a calculator! Somewhere." is no substitute for being able to perform simple math on your own.
I have a maths degree, but completely screwed up some basic arithmetic recently. Arithmetic is, as you said, a branch of mathematics, but it not the sum total (pun intended) or even a necessary part. Rather than equating it with not knowing the letters of the alphabet, I'd liken it to being unable to spell:
Good spelling, while useful in every day life isn't nearly as important as being able to write well and understand complex texts; a computer can help you with spelling. Similarly in maths, good arithmetic can be useful in life in speeding things up a bit, but with calculators on every phone and computer it isn't crucial. Whereas the important bits of maths (analytical thinking, the rigours of proof, reasoning, deduction etc.) are much harder to get a computer to help with, and are much harder to spot in oneself if not present.
It doesn't really matter if people can't remember how to do long division or multiplication by hand; what matters is that they find out/work out how to do so when needed. Given that, the OP's point does have some validity, and is not merely pedantic. That said, the title mentions "numeracy", not mathematics.
Of course, the real problem seems to be not that people cannot do maths (which, anecdotally, ime, they usually can when given encouragement and a few pointers), but that they're being taught to answer maths test questions, rather than understand the principles behind the problems; as such, it's easy to forget the specific methods, and hard to work them out later when needed. Sadly this seems to be a problem across much of the UK education system.