media – Miss Norledge's Storeroom

I SUCK at maths!

Thoughts and Ideas / September 22, 2015

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?

I SUCK at maths! Read More »

Memory and the Internet

Still checking through my old post archive and I found this. Thought it was worth reposting because a) it’s reminded me what a good programme “The Digital Human” is (I will have to check when it’s on again) and b) it seems even more relevant in the light of imminent GCSE curriculum changes. With a bit of digging, I’ve found out that I wrote this post in October 2012 – not sure which Katy Perry song I was referring to, but they all sound the same anyway!

Stuck in traffic on the way home today, and bored of listening to Katy Perry’s latest offering on pretty much repeat on most of the local radio stations, I made a very exciting discovery on Radio 4. I caught the last fifteen minutes of the program Digital Human, which explores how the world around us has evolved in the Digital Age. The programme I caught the end of was on memory, and looked at the idea that our memory is getting worse because we now have information permanently at our fingertips through smartphones and the Internet. It’s well worth a listen, but a couple of things on there gave me a lot of food for thought.

Transactional Memory
Now, I knew absolutely nothing about this until listening to this programme. Transactional memory refers to the fact that we know people (or increasingly, things) who have specialist knowledge about certain topics, and therefore we don’t need to memorise the knowledge ourselves.

A couple of examples mentioned were a husband who knew everything about sport (and therefore his wife could just ask
him anything she wanted to know at any point, without needing to memorise as the information was readily available), and a dad who knew all the addresses, birthdays and anniversaries for his family – rather relevant to me, as every year around Christmas time, I inevitably call my mother for a list of addresses to send cards to.

The programme made the point that we have just swapped these specialist people for “things”, such as our smartphones or computers, and rather than memorising the information, we are instead using our memory to remember where to find the information when needed.

This rang very true with me (and not just because of the Christmas card thing). I thought of all the times in the past I used to phone my dad when my computer blew up or something malfunctioned, but now my first port of call is Google (usually on another device if I’ve majorly virused something). If I’ve forgotten a minor point from S1 to teach my A Level class, I turn to the Internet first, rather than ask one of my comparatively many friends who work with statistics on a daily basis.

Jack, the fifteen year old, and his breakthrough Science Fair project
To finish off the programme, an interview was conducted with a fifteen-year-old living in Maryland, who had designed a rather complex early warning system for various types of cancer. Judging by his vocabulary and verbosity, the lad was obviously quite bright – however, I was amazed when he explained the complexity of his ideas (and confess to not understanding them fully!). He explained that he had taken some personal research he had done on the Internet, connected it with his school Biology work, done a bit of additional reading, then invented this fascinating bit of equipment that’s cheaper and more effective than the current warning systems.

He discussed the fact that, without the Internet, his discovery would not have been possible, because he wouldn’t have had so many scientific journals and research documents readily available at his fingertips. Crucially, the interviewer said something right at the end of Jack’s slot that really stuck with me: being smart used to be about knowing lots of facts, because information wasn’t so easily accessible, but that being smart now means being able to access, filter and synthesise the vast amounts of information available to us. Which got me thinking on the third point…

How does our education system relate to this?
This is something I’ve thought about a lot before, and I’ve read quotes from mathematicians saying stuff along the same lines: if your job involves mathematics on a professional level, you don’t try to memorise loads of formulae, as you can just look them up as and when you need to. Another point the programme made was on the function of memory – it is designed that we should forget things after they have stopped being useful. One researcher talked about the brain being a “behaviour machine”, not a “memory machine”, which adapts to the situations we find ourselves in as we go through life and alters memory accordingly.

Which all boils down to one thing, really. Why, with all this technology at our fingertips, and continually evolving ways to access information as and when we need it, do we still have an exam system in Mathematics that focuses so strongly on memorising facts (which inevitably disappear from the heads of Year 11s very soon after they finish their exams), and not techniques for finding, synthesising and finding applications for existing information, which is surely a much more important skill to have to survive in the Digital Age?

Hmm… got a bit ranty at the end there, didn’t I?

The programme is still available via the BBC using the link above. Gotta love blasts from the past!