Poor numeracy 'blights the economy and ruins lives'

davetrousers

2 + 3 x 5 = 17

kabayiri

ILW wrote: »

Apparently 70% of the population are innumerate. I am proud the be in the 40% that are not.

I'll never tire of this joke

This one isn't as good.

'There are only 10 types of people who understand binary'

ILW

davetrousers wrote: »

2 + (3 x 5) = 17

Corrected.

LydiaJ

chewmylegoff wrote: »

i cannot do maths in my head. even adding two small numbers together takes me quite a while, and subtraction usually goes goes wrong. i can't do times tables as i never learned them, and mental division is out of the question.

despite this i have the following qualifications:

a-level maths (alright, i only got a B, but that's because i got 98% in the pure paper and about 30% in the applied one, because i couldn't 'get' applied maths).

biotechnology bsc, which included a significant amount of fairly complicated maths e.g. fluid dynamics.

ACA qualified with first time passes.

not being able to do it in my head it doesn't seem to have done me too much harm.

i think people get a bit too excited about the ability to add up in one's head.

Even if you can't do numbers in your head, you can clearly do numbers with a calculator. The biggest problem is the proportion of people who can't do either.

LydiaJ

kabayiri wrote: »

'There are only 10 types of people: those who understand binary and those who don't.'

I've always liked that one.

My friend and I have both recently enjoyed teaching our year 10 classes that they can count to 31 on the fingers of one hand, or 1023 with both hands.

chewmylegoff

i would say that if you can operate a phone you should be able to operate a calculator.

but then i remembered that someone seems to have been able to successfully sell an iphone app for splitting the bill in a restaurant in quite large numbers, when the iphone has a calculator on it.

splitting the bill annoys me, as it always gets given to me as "the accountant" and then i have to get my phone out to use the calculator and everyone expresses shock that i can't do it in my head.

Puddleglum

I think that part of the problem is that basic maths is just that, basic maths. If you haven't got it by the age of 9 then they keep trying to teach you the same stuff in the same way at the age of 10, 11, 12..... At the age of 16 when you did not manage to gain a C at GCSE they carry on teaching you the same basic maths in the same way under the guise of an adult numeracy programme. Is it really any wonder that people prefer to say "oh, I'm no good at maths, me" and avoid the subject if possible?

vivatifosi

LydiaJ wrote: »

Even if you can't do numbers in your head, you can clearly do numbers with a calculator. The biggest problem is the proportion of people who can't do either.

I agree with Lydia. It doesn't matter how people do it, so long as they can do it. My list was purely there to show the sort of thing that people ought to be able to do, not to suggest that they should be able to do it without the calculator. I only mentioned the calculator in one of them because you'd have to be pretty good at mental maths to be able to do that one in your head. I can't do long division at all, I was never taught how, but I can and do use a calculator for that.

LydiaJ

chewmylegoff wrote: »

i would say that if you can operate a phone you should be able to operate a calculator.

but then i remembered that someone seems to have been able to successfully sell an iphone app for splitting the bill in a restaurant in quite large numbers, when the iphone has a calculator on it.

splitting the bill annoys me, as it always gets given to me as "the accountant" and then i have to get my phone out to use the calculator and everyone expresses shock that i can't do it in my head.

The problem for a lot of people isn't operating the calculator, it's knowing what to do with the numbers. Almost anyone can use a calculator to multiply three numbers together. The problem is knowing which numbers to add and which to multiply. Suppose I tell you that a room is 2.5m wide, 3.2m long and 2.2m high, and I am buying paint that does 13 square metres per litre when covering a smooth wall, but I need an extra 20% because the previous owner has put annoying textured wallpaper up. With a calculator, you could work out how much paint I need, couldn't you? But a lot of people couldn't, and that's what we're talking about.

StevieJ

Pennywise wrote: »

At 18, I got a job as a trainee accountant, and we only had a couple of adding machines for several people, so again, it was usually a matter of adding up and cross-casting rows and columns of figures in my head. This was long before computers.

My old boss who was of the Chartered variety was amazing at that, he could just look at a huge list of large numbers and give you the correct total, apparently that was all he did for the first twelve months of articles, way back when so yes basic numeracy it is largely practice.