For Once, I Side Against Math
May. 21st, 2013 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueThis month, Smithsonian-Pew came out with the results of a survey of 1000 US adults, asking "From kindergarten through 12th grade, what one subject should schools emphasize more than they do now?" The results, not surprisingly, broke down like this:
30% Math
19% English
11% Science
10% History/Civics
6% Arts
4% Computers
20% Other (in which econ ties with gym and religion at 2% each and foreign language ties at 1% with anti-bullying)
790 adults of America: I disagree. History and science people? Well done.
I love math. I am a mathy person. I wound up with a bachelor of science instead of a bachelor of arts basically by accident, as a side effect of taking a lot of math classes for the heck of it. I think there is a level of math literacy that is necessary for living a sensible life (as opposed to wandering in a fog of superstition and instability). I am horrified when I find out I am talking to someone who doesn't understand probability, can't glance at a statistic and tell whether it's plausible, can't estimate an object's height, and so on. I am even now referring to quantitative survey data. Numbers: they give us useful information and we are better off if we understand what they are saying.
But realistically, do I think most people - even most professional scientists - particularly need to know calculus? I don't. If you can get through Algebra I, usually taught sometime around age 13, you're probably ok. Some geometry/trig is nice. The stuff beyond that - matrixes, derivatives, fourier transformations, and all the rest - you're not really going to use unless it's your field. You need it if you're designing an airplane. You need it if you're responsible for managing the power grid of a city. The people who want to do that stuff aren't going to be doing it with just a high school degree.
So by that measure of "more" math, I don't think we need more math. Does "more" math instead mean we need to teach the early, basic stuff like addition, but teach it more? Well, I do think people are a bit stupid about fractions, inexplicably. Percentages, similarly. A lot don't seem to understand what a square root (or cube root) represents in a practical sense. It would be nice to get that cleared up.
However, I sincerely doubt that the more math people are thinking much beyond "math is important!" I doubt the more math people have looked at how much math is already in the average school curriculum. I doubt the more math people have looked at our test scores in math. I think what we're seeing is a knee-jerk "math!" response to any stiumulus. There's a contemporary cultural idea that math is a magical key that unlocks all understanding of science and technology, and the shortcut to science, technology, innovation, and wealth is therefore more math.
This is about like saying that the key to being well-read is studying more grammar. I notice that Susie isn't particularly literate, so we should make sure she knows that "walked" is a past participle.
I think this partly because on this same survey of 1000 adults, only 47% knew electrons are smaller than atoms. Let me repeat that: less than half of the adults surveyed knew that electrons are smaller than atoms. Fewer than half knew that lasers aren't made of sound waves. These are true-false questions and answering randomly should give you 50% correct.
Being better at math doesn't tell you about electrons. It doesn't tell you about experimental design. It doesn't tell you how photosynthesis works and whether this is the way solar panels operate. It doesn't tell you why making a car run on gas is so much easier than making a car run on anything else. It doesn't tell you about heritability, and whether you're going to have your father's hairline, and why. That's the stuff you have to learn slowly, a bit at a time, through lots of exposure; you can't shortcut science. Breakthroughs come because someone looks at minutia, because they get curious about how something works, and maybe because they draw a paralell to some other thing they found interesting.
So sure, math is important, but not more important than having legible handwriting, or knowing the history of the civil rights movement, or knowing that Afghanistan is nearer to China than to Egypt. When I get into an argument with someone over big political priorities, it's not because we disagree about math; it's because they don't know the average income of a person in Arkansas, or whether a particular quote comes from Shakespeare, the Bible, or a recent scientific paper. To know stuff, you have to know stuff. You have to be able to know when somebody says "this is just like Watergate" that it is or it isn't. You have to be able to know when somebody says Iran is in league with Iraq whether that's likely given their histories. You have to be able to know when somebody tries to sell you a low-fat olive oil that olive oil is 100% fat.
Math is the easiest thing to teach. It's the easiest thing to test. It has exactly one right answer, always, and you can look through the steps someone took to get to their wrong answer and point and say "there you go; there's the problem." Math is clean in a way nothing in the world is clean. Math does not give a damn about your home life. Math does not threaten or undermine your religion or your political beliefs. Math is, to an extent, sudoku puzzles (which do not themselves involve math). Math is being able to call a color kelly green instead of emerald green, and do it with confidence.
If there are a lot of people wandering around in the world, not sure whether to trust the government or a doctor, unable to get jobs beyond a retail level, making decisions about where to live, what to eat, how to vote, feeling unhappy and alone and pointless, math is not going to save them. Math alone is not going to bring them peace. Science, literature, geography, history, civics, logic? They might.
30% Math
19% English
11% Science
10% History/Civics
6% Arts
4% Computers
20% Other (in which econ ties with gym and religion at 2% each and foreign language ties at 1% with anti-bullying)
790 adults of America: I disagree. History and science people? Well done.
I love math. I am a mathy person. I wound up with a bachelor of science instead of a bachelor of arts basically by accident, as a side effect of taking a lot of math classes for the heck of it. I think there is a level of math literacy that is necessary for living a sensible life (as opposed to wandering in a fog of superstition and instability). I am horrified when I find out I am talking to someone who doesn't understand probability, can't glance at a statistic and tell whether it's plausible, can't estimate an object's height, and so on. I am even now referring to quantitative survey data. Numbers: they give us useful information and we are better off if we understand what they are saying.
But realistically, do I think most people - even most professional scientists - particularly need to know calculus? I don't. If you can get through Algebra I, usually taught sometime around age 13, you're probably ok. Some geometry/trig is nice. The stuff beyond that - matrixes, derivatives, fourier transformations, and all the rest - you're not really going to use unless it's your field. You need it if you're designing an airplane. You need it if you're responsible for managing the power grid of a city. The people who want to do that stuff aren't going to be doing it with just a high school degree.
So by that measure of "more" math, I don't think we need more math. Does "more" math instead mean we need to teach the early, basic stuff like addition, but teach it more? Well, I do think people are a bit stupid about fractions, inexplicably. Percentages, similarly. A lot don't seem to understand what a square root (or cube root) represents in a practical sense. It would be nice to get that cleared up.
However, I sincerely doubt that the more math people are thinking much beyond "math is important!" I doubt the more math people have looked at how much math is already in the average school curriculum. I doubt the more math people have looked at our test scores in math. I think what we're seeing is a knee-jerk "math!" response to any stiumulus. There's a contemporary cultural idea that math is a magical key that unlocks all understanding of science and technology, and the shortcut to science, technology, innovation, and wealth is therefore more math.
This is about like saying that the key to being well-read is studying more grammar. I notice that Susie isn't particularly literate, so we should make sure she knows that "walked" is a past participle.
I think this partly because on this same survey of 1000 adults, only 47% knew electrons are smaller than atoms. Let me repeat that: less than half of the adults surveyed knew that electrons are smaller than atoms. Fewer than half knew that lasers aren't made of sound waves. These are true-false questions and answering randomly should give you 50% correct.
Being better at math doesn't tell you about electrons. It doesn't tell you about experimental design. It doesn't tell you how photosynthesis works and whether this is the way solar panels operate. It doesn't tell you why making a car run on gas is so much easier than making a car run on anything else. It doesn't tell you about heritability, and whether you're going to have your father's hairline, and why. That's the stuff you have to learn slowly, a bit at a time, through lots of exposure; you can't shortcut science. Breakthroughs come because someone looks at minutia, because they get curious about how something works, and maybe because they draw a paralell to some other thing they found interesting.
So sure, math is important, but not more important than having legible handwriting, or knowing the history of the civil rights movement, or knowing that Afghanistan is nearer to China than to Egypt. When I get into an argument with someone over big political priorities, it's not because we disagree about math; it's because they don't know the average income of a person in Arkansas, or whether a particular quote comes from Shakespeare, the Bible, or a recent scientific paper. To know stuff, you have to know stuff. You have to be able to know when somebody says "this is just like Watergate" that it is or it isn't. You have to be able to know when somebody says Iran is in league with Iraq whether that's likely given their histories. You have to be able to know when somebody tries to sell you a low-fat olive oil that olive oil is 100% fat.
Math is the easiest thing to teach. It's the easiest thing to test. It has exactly one right answer, always, and you can look through the steps someone took to get to their wrong answer and point and say "there you go; there's the problem." Math is clean in a way nothing in the world is clean. Math does not give a damn about your home life. Math does not threaten or undermine your religion or your political beliefs. Math is, to an extent, sudoku puzzles (which do not themselves involve math). Math is being able to call a color kelly green instead of emerald green, and do it with confidence.
If there are a lot of people wandering around in the world, not sure whether to trust the government or a doctor, unable to get jobs beyond a retail level, making decisions about where to live, what to eat, how to vote, feeling unhappy and alone and pointless, math is not going to save them. Math alone is not going to bring them peace. Science, literature, geography, history, civics, logic? They might.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-09 04:16 pm (UTC)