Acalculia

Watch this video.

It’s somewhat disturbing for me to think that the young people of our country can’t do basic math, but then they sky seems to be falling on our mathematics education standards with the start of every new school year. I wonder if I should start administering a basic math skills assessment when I interview potential engineers.

The basic problem here seems to be lack of class time. The meteorologist in the video states that children don’t receive enough teaching on the basic algorithms of mathematics—how to perform double digit multiplication, long division, etc. The curriculum she rails against instead teaches more abstract approaches to solving these problems—breaking down a long double digit multiplication into smaller pieces and then adding those pieces up, for instance.

I’m of two minds about this, as with most things. I agree that not teaching children so that they can evaluate math problems mechanically with a foolproof algorithm so that they can be guaranteed to arrive at the correct answer seems to be a mistake. It’s creating a culture where nobody can do arithmetic anymore without a calculator and that clearly isn’t a good thing.

On the other hand, only knowing how to mechanically solve problems doesn’t prepare children for the inevitable moment when they encounter a problem that doesn’t fit into the algorithm, a problem that requires more analytical, critical thinking. I solve both types of problems every day as an engineer, and we need people who can handle both.