"a peculiarly British disease which we aim to eradicate"

May 23, 2024 3:23 AM

Yesterday was the seventh National Numeracy Day in the UK. You can take the numeracy challenge (email sign-up, throw-away should work). Research in 2019 reported that 56% of adults in the UK have numeracy levels which are those expected of a primary-school child (Entry Level 3 or lower). National Numeracy (Wikipedia article), which organises the day, has reported on the role of confidence and the gender divide in maths. A Parliamentary Research Briefing describes government initiatives to improve numeracy, including the delayed Multiply programme for adults, maths hubs and an advisory committee. The Impact Report for National Numeracy Day 2023 says that "103,280 people took action on the National Numeracy Challenge" last year.

The quote is from the former chair of National Numeracy:

A YouGov poll for the charity suggests that while four out of five people would be embarrassed to confess to poor literacy skills, just over half would feel the same about admitting poor maths skills. "It is simply inexcusable for anyone to say: 'I can't do maths.' It is a peculiarly British disease which we aim to eradicate. "It doesn't happen in other parts of the world. With encouragement and good teaching, everyone can improve their numeracy." Mr Humphries said just 15% of Britons studied maths after the age of 16, compared with 50-100% in most developed nations.

posted by paduasoy (51 comments total)

Numeracy Day 2023 says that "103,280 people took action
pretty exact, but i guess they'd know
posted by HearHere at 4:06 AM on May 23 [4 favorites]

Can confirm that a throwaway address from Email On Deck worked just fine.
posted by flabdablet at 4:27 AM on May 23 [2 favorites]

"It is simply inexcusable for anyone to say: 'I can't do maths.' It is a peculiarly British disease which we aim to eradicate."

The statistic about math studies after age 16 does seem pretty poor, but seriously, I'd love to know where these magic lands of math maniacs are, because "I can't do math(s)" seems pretty universal across cultures, IME.

Actually, somehow completely avoiding any sort of cultural exchange despite having a 15% foreign-born population and £12.99 flights to Europe may be a peculiarly British disease...
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 4:29 AM on May 23 [6 favorites]

Yargggh matey, there be imperial to metric conversion traps over yonder.

Pretty reasonable set of questions otherwise I think.
posted by lawrencium at 4:44 AM on May 23

Except for the one that asked if we think real estate values will continue in increase 50%. I wouldn’t believe a chart from a realtor that made that claim. Real estate values can’t be assessed from past performance alone, like any investment. That one was a bad question for getting at what they were trying to test.
posted by MythMaker at 4:56 AM on May 23

> That one was a bad question for getting at what they were trying to test.

I had a similar one, two pie charts but no absolute numbers - "which one of these slices had more" (paraphrasing). One of the choices was "can't tell", so again, reasonable? Didn't see the real estate question.
posted by lawrencium at 5:03 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

I see no mention of cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia / dyscalculia in any of the (pre email registration) text and that's disappointing, because I strongly suspect a lot of the adult lower maths literacy - at least in the UK - is to do with how maths is / has been taught as well as class / cultural assumptions and prejudices regards how "Not being good at maths = Stupid"

Hiding difficulties with Math (and reading Literacy) are things that it's relatively easy to do now, but depending on the root, can cause deep seated shame and feelings of inadequacy.

I base this on my own experiences as a teenager who luckily had my Dyscalulia spotted by a particularly empathic Maths teacher - I was otherwise labelled an academically 'gifted' child and yet I sincerely couldn't read an analogue clock or mentally figure out small change.

As a young adult, I was also fortunate to gently coax a 50 year man into going to night school to up his reading comprehension from early Primary / Elementary school levels. Up to that point, this man had successfully run several companies, some with hundreds of employees - and was also a skilled worker of wrought iron. He apparently accomplished all that reading at 7 year old level. This was never picked up because he was (his words) " Never really expected to achieve anything other than Trade school training ".

In 2021 Jay Blades (of BBC 'Repair Shop Show') took part in a programme 'Jay Blades Learning to read at 51'. It was heartbreaking to see the shame he obviously felt at the beginning, and I recognised the defensive tactics he deployed in not only hiding the fact he knew his reading comprehension was low but alss the tactics he used to hide this from other people.

I also really appreciated how the program showed him struggling - and - his joy and growing confidence at being able to conquer this single everyday skill that he was previously convinced would never be his. He went from reading pictorial books aged at 4 - 8 year old's, and finished being able to read scripts and production notes for the 'Repair shop' - something he's always managed to avoid.
posted by Faintdreams at 5:27 AM on May 23 [9 favorites]

Yes, there's not a lot of reference specifically to dyslexia on the NN site, though it looks as if they have done at least one joint event with the Dyslexia Association. They do have a focus on ways of teaching maths, and talk about dyscalculia, with a reading list.
posted by paduasoy at 5:44 AM on May 23 [3 favorites]

A YouGov poll for the charity suggests that while four out of five people would be embarrassed to confess to poor literacy skills, just over half would feel the same about admitting poor maths skills. "It is simply inexcusable for anyone to say: 'I can't do maths.'"

I'm sure that kind of language will help with the sense of shame, encourage people to contact you for help. Bloody hell.
posted by Dysk at 6:21 AM on May 23 [4 favorites]

It’s because ‘maths’ is not the every day negotiating figures and numerical calculation that comes with context, to answer questions like how long will it take me to get to work if I miss the usual bus and have to wait for the next? Or, if my team goes up by another goal, what does that mean for goal difference and percentage on the ladder? Or, what does another interest rate rise mean for my repayments? ‘Maths’ is memorising the quadratic equation that everyone tries to do in year 8 and bounced off.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:39 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

I think there is a cultural devaluation of scenario of math and science. My physics professor accurately observed that, among the faculty at his elite American college, it would be acceptable for an English professor to say he didn't understand Newton's laws and it wasn't worth his time to learn them, but it would be unacceptable for a science professor to dismiss Hamlet in the same way.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:48 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

It's a tough balance. On the one hand you don't want people being ashamed to admit they don't get math. On the other hand, there's the "Math is hard!" Barbie thing. How much does hearing math constantly get treated as something impenetrable that nobody likes - nobody similar to you, anyway - affect people's attitudes towards it, and how much do attitudes affect people's success at learning it? (I think the OP links on the role of confidence and gender gap skills address those questions; I've also seen studies supporting the significant effects on success of being told people like you are good or bad at math, but don't have time to look them up.)

"Math is hard" stuff is everywhere, constantly. (I don't live in the UK but I do watch a lot of Great British [Crafting] shows, and if there's one constant on those it's jokes about how somebody's a booze-hound; if there are two constants, the second is hearing "maths is so hard", "I was never good at maths", "I hate numbers", ad nauseum. (The "maths" involved is stuff like how do I cut this long strip of dough/fabric/whatever into 6 short strips.) I still remember one time on Bake Off one of the hosts was all "ooh, how do you even understand all these impenetrable equations you've got there, look at all those squiggles, I could never do that" and the baker, whose notebook just listed ingredient amounts or something, blandly looked up at him and said "... those are numbers, not equations" and I almost cheered.)

Judging from the linked Wikipedia and BBC articles, National Numeracy pushes back against that kind of stuff a lot. The quoted phrasing about how saying "I can't do maths" is inexcusable isn't great, but it's clear from context - and from all the other quotes they give - that what they object to is how "I can't do maths" is just regularly thrown out cheerfully, scornfully, hatefully, or almost as a point of pride, and generally intended as "nobody except weirdo brainiacs can do maths". Whereas I think (and apparently they think) this emphatically doesn't happen with "I can't read", and there would probably be a huge scandal if it did.
posted by trig at 7:00 AM on May 23 [8 favorites]

I can't get my results without entering a valid UK postcode and local authority
posted by TedW at 7:04 AM on May 23 [2 favorites]

it is sad to me that people are systematically discouraged from developing a meaningful, enjoyable relationship with maths, which is this expansive thing that appears across cultures and seems to spring from some very basic aspects of how people think and communicate about the world around them. it's usually taught in a bizarrely hostile and authoritarian way, and that's a tragedy, because facility with maths (the capacity for which is latent to an appreciable degree in pretty much everyone, reports of the existence of "maths people" and "non-maths people" have been greatly exaggerated) is also a source of power, and it's kind of a big serious problem to systematically favour, when apportioning that power, the sort of people who don't get turned off by bizarrely hostile and authoritarian situations.
posted by busted_crayons at 7:08 AM on May 23 [7 favorites]

I can't get my results without entering a valid UK postcode an local authority

I left those blank and just clicked the "Next" (or whatever) button, and it was fine.

Anyway, I scored 20/20, although I did use a calculator (as the test permitted) and for a couple of questions I had to make an educated guess. And yet, if you asked me to estimate my skill at mathematics, I'd say it was mediocre at best, and that I only passed math classes in high school and college by the skin of my teeth. I still don't have a clue what matrices are for.

Also, didn't they change the order of operations a few years ago?
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:15 AM on May 23

Also, didn't they change the order of operations a few years ago?

I don't know if it was changed anywhere but apparently it's different in different countries, which seems like a dangerous way to run a world...
posted by trig at 7:22 AM on May 23 [5 favorites]

Sorry, I take that back - that's about different acronyms but I think the same order. But I could swear there was a big deal a few years back about (I think) a standardized exam question where it turned out some countries do actually teach a different order, or a different order for evaluating operations of the same level. However, I can't find it on a quick search and don't have energy to do a better one right now.
posted by trig at 7:28 AM on May 23 [2 favorites]

The order of operations mnemonic changes but everyone is teaching the same concept: Parentheses/Brackets/Grouping all mean the same thing, and Index/Exponents also mean the same thing. Order is utterly ambiguous and a terrible choice for a mnemonic so of course it’s in the British version.
posted by Headfullofair at 7:34 AM on May 23

Whereas I think (and apparently they think) this emphatically doesn't happen with "I can't read", and there would probably be a huge scandal if it did.

As there should be. Reading is pretty damned fundamental to making one’s way through even the most basic life. Math(s), beyond the grade school basics, simply isn’t. The old joke about, say, algebra, that once you pass the class you’ll never need to use it again in real life, still largely rings true for most people. Reading, not so much.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:55 AM on May 23

the average project cost graph was: a) an abomination of a graph; b) exactly the sort of graph that people sling about, alas. The "If today is Tuesday 14th April, what date is the last Wednesday of the month?" one was the only one I had to go 'oh wait how do dates do again?'

and if you got the heights question, yay third decimal place! Yay for Unix bc and units!
posted by scruss at 7:57 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

I think there's a sort of residual classism aspect to society's different relationships to reading and math as well. Historically, working for a living was sort of déclassé; the ruling class focused on preparing their sons to well, rule, and foreign languages, classical texts, and history were the crucial subjects to create future governors and ambassadors (daughters just needed to learn enough to be entertaining at the elite get-togethers, some language learning and music was probably enough). This endures today with the humanities still being considered the essence of 'culture' and math and science still being inscrutable technical knowledge for eggheads.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 7:58 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

They said I could use a calculator so I used dc...
posted by jim in austin at 8:08 AM on May 23

That was interesting. There were a couple of questions relating to compass directions that I wouldn't have thought of as maths but more map reading.

I like that some of it was not just raw number crunching but also the ability to look at a dodgy graph and declare that it was bollocks.
posted by antiwiggle at 8:24 AM on May 23

The statistic about math studies after age 16 does seem pretty poor, but seriously, I'd love to know where these magic lands of math maniacs are, because "I can't do math(s)" seems pretty universal across cultures, IME.

I could be wrong about this, but my sense is that there are pretty big cultural differences that have to do with the idea of being "good at math" or "not good at math." People in the US tend to see those as innate, fixed categories and tend to think that if you're "bad at math," you probably won't be able to learn anything past basic arithmetic. I've worked with a lot of college students from China, most of whom were not super strong students in high school, and they all seem to think of math at least through calculus as something that almost everyone can do with some effort and guidance. There may be people who have a disability that prevents them from learning calculus, in the same way that there may be people who have a disability that prevents them from leaning to read or ride a bike, but most people can do those things, and you don't have to have some special innate talent to do them. This is another way of saying that most people in the US have a fixed mindset when it comes to math, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true of the UK. And I don't think that's universal, although it definitely is true of some places other than Britain.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:15 AM on May 23 [7 favorites]

> I had a similar one, two pie charts but no absolute numbers - "which one of these slices had more" (paraphrasing). One of the choices was "can't tell", so again, reasonable?

I got the one about the coldest day but it didn't show any temperatures, and then told me I got it wrong when I said that I couldn't tell.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:19 AM on May 23

The old joke about, say, algebra, that once you pass the class you’ll never need to use it again in real life, still largely rings true for most people. Reading, not so much.

Usually when I hear people saying "haha, I suck at math" or "I hate math" or "ugh, math" it's when they're faced with some basic arithmetic. Or even just plain numbers, with nary an equation in sight. Literacy isn't the same as literature, and basic numeracy isn't the same as higher math.
posted by trig at 9:39 AM on May 23 [5 favorites]

‘Maths’ is memorising the quadratic equation that everyone tries to do in year 8 and bounced off.

I adored the general solution to quadratics on first exposure to it, and still occasionally walk myself through the derivation of it when I need to calm down.

didn't they change the order of operations a few years ago?

6 / 2(1+2) made the rounds on social media a few years ago and split people into white-dress vs blue-dress warring camps, because there are two equally defensible interpretations.

The first starts by rewriting with the implicit multiplication made explicit and a proper division operator replacing the slash:

6 ÷ 2 × (1+2)

Evaluate parenthesized subexpressions first:

6 ÷ 2 × 3

All remaining operators have equal precedence, so evaluate them left to right:

3 × 3

for a final result of 9.

The other way interprets the slash surrounded by whitespace not as equivalent to ÷ but rather as an in-line textual representation of a fraction bar:

  6   
2(1+2)

Evaluate numerator and denominator separately:

 6  
2(3)

6
6

and reduce to lowest terms for a final result of 1.

Really the controversy had very little to do with order of operations and everything to do with deliberate ambiguity. The expression as presented is just bad. If you mean 6 ÷ 2 × (1+2), write 6 ÷ 2 × (1+2).
posted by flabdablet at 9:49 AM on May 23 [7 favorites]

Fiasco da Gama: ‘Maths’ is memorising the quadratic equation that everyone tries to do in year 8 and bounced off.

Just sing it to Pop Goes the Weasel.

20/20 the only issue for me was brief cognitive dissonance at some of the measurements. I'm glad they gave conversions right there on the problems.

trig: generally intended as "nobody except weirdo brainiacs can do maths". Whereas I think (and apparently they think) this emphatically doesn't happen with "I can't read", and there would probably be a huge scandal if it did.

Change "can't" to "don't" and it's a point of pride with a lot of adult Americans, unfortunately. But that's a different conversation.
posted by tzikeh at 9:54 AM on May 23

I've worked with a lot of college students from China, most of whom were not super strong students in high school, and they all seem to think of math at least through calculus as something that almost everyone can do with some effort and guidance.

That's interesting, I wonder if it ties into wider ideas about how learning should occur? I've read that in China, long hours of study outside school and private tutoring are the norm and teaching methods emphasize repetition and memorization, whereas in the US there seems to be more of a focus on students developing a holistic and intuitive understanding a topic (which may itself be part of the problem; I floundered through calculus in high school because it was the first time couldn't intuitively backwards engineer the problem-solving processes from the problem I was supposed to be solving. I then sailed through it in college because I had the rote "tools" down and could actually think about the subject matter.)

This also kind of makes me think about the US attitude toward art, poetry, classical music, etc. My now-husband, who is not American, was kind of bewildered the first time he asked me if I liked poetry and I said, "Oh no, I'm too stupid for it, I'm a real Philistine." He basically replied, "A poem is just some words. You read them and like them or you don't. You can think poetry is boring, but you can't be too stupid for it, you just have to know how to read." He was right, but I had just been so brought up on the idea that you had to be upper-middle class or above with college professor parents to understand something so lofty as poetry that I assumed it was beyond me.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 10:00 AM on May 23 [3 favorites]

basic numeracy isn't the same as higher math

Not only that, but pencil and paper arithmetic isn't the same as basic numeracy, and having watched all three of my kids struggle with pencil and paper arithmetic to the point of hostility to the whole enterprise, I firmly believe that teaching pencil and paper arithmetic first does many kids a huge disservice.

For kids who don't yet grasp what it actually means to multiply something by ten or what kinds of thing it's legitimate to add together, and whose handwriting is still in the process of being got under control, expecting them to memorize a bunch of fiddly little recipes for manipulating multi-digit numbers while keeping everything tidily in its own columns is a huge ask - especially if they're dealing with visual processing issues that have all those digits wandering about at random.

Teach geometry first.
posted by flabdablet at 10:04 AM on May 23 [3 favorites]

I saw this mathematical graffito recently in a car park. I didn't understand it, but my niece says the first bit is the general solution to quadratic equations. I missed that at school somehow. She wasn't sure what was going on with the rest of it.
posted by paduasoy at 10:07 AM on May 23

When I was a school governor at a primary school a few years ago, the local authority got very excited about teaching maths using the same techniques as they apparently do in Shanghai. I went to some training sessions on it. As far as I could tell, there was an emphasis on carrying all children along - not moving to a new piece of learning until the whole class had achieved the previous one. It was difficult for me, and the teachers at my school, to understand how this worked for children with SEND. We were also told that the whole class would clap correct answers, and that, as nanny's striped stocking says, there was a lot of rote learning. The school imploded not long after so I didn't follow it through, but a headteacher I talked to later said that it was part of a long line of fads in maths teaching.
posted by paduasoy at 10:13 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

I'm not very confident with math, but as a USian I found it almost more difficult to figure out what postal code and local authority to put in!

that said, I got 18!!! I'm very proud of myself. and thankful there was no algebra. of course I have no idea what the levels mean, but I interpret that I have long been correct in thinking I have a decent high school level of math.
posted by supermedusa at 10:17 AM on May 23 [2 favorites]

The gender stuff is interesting. There's a graph in the gender report of responses when they asked people without a level 2 maths qual what they thought the effect had been on their working life. A smaller proportion of men thought there had been an effect than women. So 21% of men thought not having L2 maths had affected their earnings, and 59% of women. 24% of men thought it had affected their career progression, and 51% of women.
posted by paduasoy at 10:35 AM on May 23

Re: Asian vs UK/US growth vs fixed mindset -

I think there's something to it - I think what consistently tripped me living in the UK is the idea that being "bad at maths" was considered innate. Sure I had to memorise the multiplication tables and formulas but that's just like how I memorized grammar rules in order to construct sentences. And that's when I learned British schooling for those I met in uni didn't exactly emphasise grammar either, which I think is just irresponsible for elementary level stuff.

The last random convo I had that involved this was with a shop assistant and we had been chatting anyway so overall I understood she's been told that she's not bright in calculations . And the only reason it came up was because we were working out the new discounted price and I'm no great shakes in mental maths either but I just need a rough estimate and I had my multiplication tables memorised at this point.
posted by cendawanita at 10:52 AM on May 23 [3 favorites]

TIL that post decimalization coinage includes 2p.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:54 PM on May 23 [1 favorite]

The old joke about, say, algebra, that once you pass the class you’ll never need to use it again in real life, still largely rings true for most people. Reading, not so much.

I feel like this is the belief of people who are constantly getting ripped off without even knowing it. I feel like more often I think "I wish I had paid more attention in pre-cal and calculus because I just don't know how to figure out some of this stuff with the math I remember." If nothing else I feel like algebra comes up constantly at the grocery store. Oh and in videogames, especially these days for mtx casino games abstracting currencies into deliberately confusing units you need to convert back to real money, and figure out the rate over time it costs you, lest you be the total sucker who considers that whole experience as "free to play."
posted by GoblinHoney at 4:07 PM on May 23 [3 favorites]

I feel like it's fairly common to be not good at math. I suspect I have dyscalculia, but we'll never know now. I just remember being baffled early on and for most of my school career and I have done my damnedest to try to avoid having to do math at work. I am legit surprised if I come across a woman who's good at math, actually, because women "not being good at math" is SO common.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:58 PM on May 23

I am legit surprised if I come across a woman who's good at math, actually, because women "not being good at math" is SO common.

Yeah please dont do that. That's really offensive. PEOPLE tend to be not good at math, it's not a woman problem.


And on people not being good at math: I strongly believe (barring some disability) all it takes is one bad teacher to turn people off math. And given that people in general tend to be bad at math, that holds for most teachers. And in the US, in the younger grades you generally have one teacher teaching all the subjects for a given grade. It can be a toss-up whether or not that teacher understands math themself.

I am good at math, because my dad taught me before school did. But I am absolutely terrible at teaching math to anyone. I understand math so well, I just can't see how other people don't, so I can't teach them in a way that would make sense to them. I wonder if this is also a problem with teachers who are good at math?
posted by LizBoBiz at 6:25 PM on May 23 [4 favorites]

women "not being good at math" is SO common.

I work with 16 math tutors who teach all math up to calculus. All but three are women. So, you know, anecdotal evidence and all.
posted by tzikeh at 7:20 PM on May 23

How many British/English diseases are we up to now?
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 7:27 PM on May 23 [1 favorite]

When people say they’re “bad at math”, they’re talking about the limited topics they were exposed to up through high school. It’s a tragedy, because the world of math is so much bigger and more diverse. Would a different area click with them?
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:16 PM on May 23 [1 favorite]

I know it's sexist,but I hang out with a lot of lady artists who aren't so great at math.

I understand math so well, I just can't see how other people don't, so I can't teach them in a way that would make sense to them.

That's me and reading.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:55 PM on May 23

Man I loved geometry in school. We started with that and I loved it and it made so much sense to me.
posted by Carillon at 9:50 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]

Would a different area click with them?

not joking, and i'm aware that the implementation of "new math" in the US was poor, but i think there's scope for introducing pretty abstract shit to children, because it's at least as relevant to their mental landscapes as any of the supposed "real world" applications of whatever arithmetic they're being taught*. primary school children do not have that much context or motivation for mastering little games with base-10 representations of numbers, even if we tell them it'll be practical in the future. nobody is reliably motivated by some authority figure telling them about a future that they can't even picture well enough to know whether what they're being told is true. what gets kids thinking about math is pretty much the same impulse that gets literal research mathematicians thinking about math, i think, and i think the evidence is the kid going "oh yeah well haha: infinity plus infinity!!" to shut down some playground argument.

that kid is the reason why the following is, and i am serious, a gap in the primary school teaching materials toolkit: an age-appropriate introduction to ordinals and transfinite induction and that sort of thing, for 8-year-olds who already know how to count. probably in the form of games. i am fully serious. tell them they're gonna learn how to count super fucking far past infinity plus infinity. they need to know some other stuff first, but it's all like rules of a game, so if you play it like a game, and every day you remind them that they're getting more and more ready for the day that they're going to count past infinity plus infinity, i submit (with essentially zero qualification to talk about 8-year-olds beyond having at one point been 8) that this will work well with a sizable subset of the class.

the other tragedy is that i personally know tons of young people with phds in maths who are extremely good at understanding and explaining that sort of shit, for many of whom the academic job market is going to shake out in such a way that they are going to end up doing one of the destructive jobs that should make one wonder whether maths as practised in our society is really a good thing to have around, overall. instead, these folks should be given the option to retrain as primary school teachers, and given serious incentives to do so, because (and maybe i have heard incorrect stories, here) the failure of "new math", which i think was kind of like what i'm advocating, was largely due to insufficient recognition that one has to know a shit-ton of maths to teach it to 8-year-olds in a good way.

*(which, like, i'm guessing many older children who've been taught how to think about maths properly and without being forced through a fear/shame gauntlet will pick up easily if/when it's necessary, the same way it's wholly ludicrous to make a whole multi-month course devoted to the one little topic of euclidean trigonometry, except that everything taught prior has been taught inhumanely and insanely.)
posted by busted_crayons at 12:31 AM on May 24 [4 favorites]

Even without infinities, counting is really interesting and kids pick it up quickly. My 7-year-old was fiddling with a Rubix cube yesterday, and that led to the question: how many possible arrangements are there? Could someone solve them all? Combinatorics has the tools for figuring this out and it’s really just ways of counting things that are vast but finite. And it doesn’t take much background to understand.

When I think about math, the core of it is symbolic manipulation—a different kind of thinking to the arithmetic they spend so much time on in the early years. And by the time they start on algebra, some of them have already checked out because they got stuck on long division or some other atavistic arithmetic algorithm.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:12 PM on May 24 [1 favorite]

I liked geometry, but you only do it for a year and clearly algebra and calculus were the only things cared about in high school. I have heard that people tend to be good at one or the other (or at least if geometry is your strong suit, you probably are not also good with algebra too). Geometry seems to vaguely have "math for dummies" reputation.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:42 PM on May 24 [1 favorite]

Mr.Know-it-some, I think CP Snow observed the same thing: everyone is expecting to know literature but science is considered niche. I think my favorite example of this is a piece of software called Mercurial. It's used for version control -- that is, managing change. Software engineers are expected to understand that (a) hg is the chemical symbol for mercury, and that's why hg is the command used to run mercurial, and (b) mercurial means changeable, which is why it's a reasonable name for this sort of software. (Its competitor is called "git", after its creator Linus Torvalds, who is an asshole).
posted by novalis_dt at 5:19 PM on May 24 [2 favorites]

I worked in retail, then owned a retail business, so calculating percentages and the like is not bad if I have pencil and paper. I had to report labor statistics, do payroll taxes, sales and budget forecasts, pay into sales taxes, and work with lots of invoices. I'm old and American and was taught new math, which wasn't very useful. My high school didn't offer calculus; you had to go to another school, and it wasn't encouraged for girls, which is a shame. Sister Joseph Helene taught 1st & 2nd grade arithmetic, very badly, and introduced me to math anxiety. I hid worksheets in my desk because I had no confidence. It must have felt really bad because I remember it so well.

I got a question about pricing, where an item was increased by 10%, then decreased by 10%, and that was really familiar, but it's counterintuitive for many. The question with what is, in effect, compounding, I half-assed and got wrong, for a total of 19 correct, so I'm more numerate than I give myself credit for. I never remember the order of operations, so I use parentheses liberally. When I took geometry, the reasons why tangents and sines were important made sense for at least 10 minutes. I'm certain that math education and practice is good for your brain. I'm good at logic when it's well-expressed in words. My math-y friends say reality can only be expressed numerically, but I think words are capable of far more nuance.

jenfullmoon, the retail store was a bookstore, but I didn't read fiction much during a bad patch, lost my facility for it, and have mostly recovered it. If you want to read more for pleasure, a good librarian may be able to make recommendations. Reading fiction got me though a lot of shitty times, I'm so happy to have it as a resource again.

Good post, thanks, paduasoy
posted by theora55 at 3:22 PM on May 25 [3 favorites]

(Its competitor is called "git", after its creator Linus Torvalds, who is an asshole)

second-order eponysteria
posted by busted_crayons at 7:08 PM on May 25

Oh it's 100% intentional!
posted by trig at 10:10 PM on May 25 [1 favorite]