Kristen Gyles | Mathematics and the ‘real world’

If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone complain about how irrelevant all the math taught in school is in the working world, maybe I would be rich enough to also not care about math. However, this is not a very informed notion about the world of work.

Now, if the world of work for you is simply where you work, then sure, that might be true. But a significant portion of the working world actually either uses math or depends on persons who use math.

Hopefully, what I am about to say will disabuse the minds of the anti-math gremlins of all the anti-math sentiments they have been harbouring and consequently passing on to their innocent school-aged children.

I see the purpose of mathematics in schools as being primarily twofold, and I won’t rank either ‘fold’ above the other since they work in harmony.

First, mathematics is a mind-transformation tool. One of the aims of math at the primary and secondary levels is to train young minds to think logically and rationally. These skills are critical to efficient functioning in everyday life, and if you don’t see how, you are not thinking logically and rationally. Go back and do some math.

Drs Nina Attridge and Matthew Inglis, two researchers from Loughborough University, in a study involving post-secondary students conducted in England a few years ago, found that the study of mathematics engendered a greater development of logical reasoning skills.

Remember all the ‘complete the sequence’ and ‘draw the next figure in the pattern’ questions? They are currently being asked on Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) exams. I’ll agree that they have no literal application to everyday life – other than helping to train students to spot patterns and sequences they come across in everyday life.

Remember all the ‘find the unknown’ questions? Those also have no literal application to everyday life – except teaching students how to create information they are not given using available information. Real useless.

SOLVING REAL-LIFE PROBLEMS

In any case, many topics taught at the high-school level have much clearer and more vivid real-life applications. This leads me to the other aim I want to discuss, which is to help students with solving real-life problems.

Probability, Sets and Fractions, just to name a quick three, are common high-school topics we use, perhaps daily. Yet, somehow, even when the question starts with “Jack and Jill both have 12 mangoes”, we find a way to miss the practical application.

Survey data coming out of the United States claim that almost 70 per cent of the workforce uses fractions in order to carry out their work, and a little over 20 per cent uses advanced math. But beyond this, many of the most sought-after careers depend on one form of math or the other – from engineering and business to IT and programming.

Furthermore, realistically speaking, at the CSEC level, math hardly more advanced than fractions and simultaneous equations is taught. So when parents (and consequently their children) say they will never use the math being taught, they are really not referring to advanced math. They are referring to basic math that they are very likely to use.

A critical success point of the education system is getting students to a point where they can make connections between the things they learn and their everyday lives. Naturally, when they are told those connections don’t exist, they stop looking. Usually, when a parent just can’t shut up about how irrelevant they think math is, the student oftentimes isn’t very far from flunking the subject.

Parents will often bring up the opportunity cost of learning math when ‘more important’ things are not being taught.

This argument often gets raised somewhere along the string of questions about the oh-so-unsatisfactory structure of the school curriculum:

1. Why aren’t students being taught how to open bank accounts or how to pay taxes?

2. How to make online purchases or how to pay bills online?

3. Why aren’t students being taught how to invest?

4. Why aren’t students being taught about student loans and how to sign up for insurance policies?

This may be a newsflash for some but many students can and have learnt how to do these things without anyone sitting them down and spoon-feeding them with instructions. This is because they are able to use the foundational skills they developed as younglings to figure them out. Imagine having to teach someone how to do online banking when all they need to do is visit the bank website and follow basic instructions.

CRITICAL SKILL

At the root of the idea that all this mumbo jumbo they are teaching in schools is irrelevant might just be a lack of ambition; the assumption that our children will live only average mediocre lives doing only average mediocre things. Never the one creating the digital banking platform or the one programming the ATM and never the one creating the insurance policy. And as a result, we become disgruntled because the school system doesn’t shift its focus to teach students how to become good consumers.

School should not be about teaching students how to complete random tasks that they may encounter in life but should be about teaching students how to develop methods of figuring out how to do random tasks they may encounter in everyday life.

And this is a critical skill taught within mathematics – which brings me back to where we started. Mathematics teaches our students to think and to solve problems – quite the opposite of being told what to do at every step of the way.

The ‘real world’ is mathematics. There. I said it. It is also the foundation of virtually every form of technological progress that is made today. But again, if parents are focused on rearing children who will simply get by in life paying bills and taxes and opening bank accounts, that won’t matter to them.

Mathematics is what drives the most robust and lasting technologies around the world. Instead of encouraging our children to simply learn how to pay bills online, we should let them know they can learn how to create the banking software.

But, here’s a secret: They’ll need math.

- Kristen Gyles is a mathematics educator. Email feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com.