

How much math do we really need?   - yarapavan
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/22/AR2010102205451.html

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kwantam
Part of me is holding out hope that this is a troll.

    
    
        > There are even calculus textbooks showing how to calculate -- I
        > am not making this up and in fact I taught from such a book -- the
        > rate at which the fluid level in a martini glass will go down, 
        > assuming, of course, that one sips differentiably
    

This is a kind of indirect straw man. Of course nobody actually needs to know
the answer to this problem, but the point isn't to give an answer to that
question so much as to provide an example of a certain kind of word problem.
Using contrived examples to practice a skill (mathematical or otherwise) is a
very common and perfectly valid pedagogical approach; Ramanathan's attack on
the content of this problem fails to establish anything regarding the utility
of the knowledge such a problem is intended to reinforce.

    
    
        > bemoaning the innumeracy of common folk and how it is 
        > supposed to be costing billions
    

Like, for example, how people don't understand how a mortgage works and
consequently can't establish whether or not they can afford one? Yeah, that
hasn't hurt anyone recently.

    
    
        > convinced that the path to good citizenship is through math
    

Right, that's the only reasonable explanation for such behavior. Straw man
again.

    
    
        > and the National Assessment of Educational Progress math
        > scores for 17-year-olds have remained stagnant since the 1980s
    

This is orthogonal to the relevance of math. "We shouldn't teach math" in no
way follows from "we can't teach math well."

    
    
        > How much math do you really need in everyday life? Ask 
        > yourself that -- and also the next 10 people you meet, say, your 
        > plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician 
        > or even a math teacher.
    

Well, don't ask me. I recognize that my profession (electrical engineering)
requires much more math than the average person.

It's impossible to estimate how competent you are at something unless you have
some base level of competence. So, if we don't teach (much) math, we'll also
be failing to give anyone who needs it the skills to recognize whether they
need more than they have. Moreover, given Ramanathan's previous stats
regarding the dismal state of math education, my guess would be that most of
the people he listed can't actually say whether more math would help them or
not.

Of course, I can say without asking that lawyers need to understand the tenets
of logic in order to make sound arguments, and any physician who is following
literature at all needs to understand enough statistics to grok what is being
presented and judge whether the claims seem sound. And anyone who wants to
make sound financial decisions needs to understand amortization, expected
value, et cetera.

    
    
        > That courses such as "Quantitative Reasoning" improve critical 
        > thinking is an unsubstantiated myth
    

That they don't is an unsubstantiated claim from G.V.R., and let's be honest:
it rings hollow. I have little inclination to consult the relevant studies;
recognizing that the plural of anecdote is not data, I nevertheless will stop
at the observation that, e.g., learning to write mathematical proofs was, for
me, a fundamental shift in the way that I approach problems of all sorts.

    
    
        > As for the rest, there is no obligation to love math any more than
        > grammar, composition, curfew or washing up after dinner.
    

You won't get any argument here from me, but the implications GVR and I take
from this are very different: I, for one, have no wish to be an unwashed,
ungrammatical fool.

------
protomyth
"Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to
everyday life."

Quite a lot of our current political problems stem for a woeful lack of math
education.

------
rcfox
I'm willing to concede that I'm not a typical person, but really, how often do
literature, history, politics and music come up in a "normal" person's
everyday life?

