A response to Emily-Jane Clark’s piece in Monday’s Metro Online titled “18 things only people who are rubbish at maths will understand“.
Before I start, two bits of context:
- I was intending not to blog tonight, and was in the process of shutting down my laptop when I found the offending article via Twitter. Unfortunately I got so incensed by it that I had to forgo sleep to rant.
- If you read my blog a lot, you’ll know I don’t do a lot of ranting and politics – I think the Internet can be a dangerous place to start an argument. This isn’t a personal attack against the journalist who wrote the article, but I think putting stuff like this in newspapers is really really damaging for both child and adult numeracy.
So…
If you are baffled by algebra and perplexed by long division, chances are you SUCK at maths.
Well that’s got me from the start – I managed to get a bachelor’s degree without doing any long division – I’ll freely admit to not understanding how it worked until I had to teach it, and even now I avoid it like the plague. Oops, I SUCK, please don’t tell my students.
On a serious note, if you’re going to ramp up the maths anxiety at the start of an article, why not pick the two things that people generally don’t get in school maths (and arguably aren’t particularly relevant to adult life or functional numeracy anyway).
1. You can only do your times tables if you say them out loud.
Me again. However, given that children learn their times tables in Japan in exactly this way (here’s a link to information about rhyming Kuku that primary children use, but it’s also mentioned in Alex Bellos and a variety of other sources) and Japanese children score pretty highly in global maths rankings, maybe they’re on to something. Presumably there’s a reason we’ve got kids to chant their tables since the dawn of time…
2. Recipes are so confusing. So how many ounces in a pound or what is 2/3 of a table spoon?! Let’s just get a take away.
If you’re getting put off by estimating 2/3 of a tablespoon (the handle?), working out the takeaway bill might prove tricky. And let’s not forget that nearly every recipe (unless you’re looking in your Grandma’s Mrs Beeton book) is written in grams, we have electronic weighing scales and we now work on the metric system.
4. If you can’t add it up on your fingers you have to use a calculator.
One professional mathematician (who I can’t source now, but will do when it’s not really late at night) freely admitted to being bad at adding up numbers.
7. You don’t know whether 23.9% APR interest on your credit card is good or bad.
Tip for life – credit cards usually don’t give stuff away for a steal.
8. Filling out tax forms gives you a panic attack.
Universally applicable to anyone who isn’t an accountant.
10. You got ten minutes into A Beautiful Mind before switching off because…numbers.
And you missed watching Paul Bettany being generally amazing for most of the movie and this (mathematically not wholly accurate but still) great scene about how economics is like dating. Oh, and the soundtrack. And it’s not even about maths, it’s about mental illness. But never mind.
11. When people talk maths they may as well be talking in an alien language.
Not an everyday occurrence, even in my social circles. Life isn’t the Big Bang Theory.
13. For all you know you are paying way too much for your electricity because you have no idea what all the numbers on your bill mean.
Ooops, me again! Of course, we’re assuming that the amount the electricity company is charging is linked in any way to your usage rather than an estimated reading you get a refund for in a few months…
16. You will never get a mortgage because it is all too confusing.
Yes. Yes it is. That’s why mortgage advisors exist. See also comment about tax.
18. You have no idea what a logarithm is. But you can spell it. Because while numbers are your enemy, words are your friends.
I understand that this is a cutesy, clickbaiting list a la Buzzfeed; I know it’s tongue-in-cheek and not meant to be taken seriously. This this THIS is what made me so cross. Putting the words “numbers are your enemy” in a pretty large national newspaper should really not be OK! Let’s not forget that adult numeracy in the UK has actually got worse, lots of people, both children and adults, really dislike or are actually scared of maths. As a teacher, it’s my job to try and work against that, to try and show people that maths actually isn’t the horrible monster under the bed that some people assume it is, and it is so difficult when you’re battling against a tide of anti-maths phrases and sentiment all the time.
We’ve discussed use of the phrase “I’m bad at maths” or “I could never do maths” at school – if pupils hear it coming from adults, that somehow makes it more acceptable. When I meet people for the first time and have the usual life/job chat, some people fall over themselves to tell me how much they hated maths, or were bad at it, or only got a grade D, as if I’m going to say “oh well done you!”. This cultural norm of it being “cool” to be bad at maths or to say that you hate maths probably has something to do with the falling numeracy levels, the fact that very few pupils take maths post-GCSE and also the association that “only geeks enjoy maths”.
Maths is everywhere – it forms the building blocks of our universe, world, home and electronic devices. Rather than sticking our heads in the sand and saying we don’t like it or SUCK at it, why don’t we start doing something about it?