Name: Good question. Let’s continue with the “discipline formerly known as mathematics.”
Age: about 2500 years.
Appearance: Lots of Xes and Ys and triangles and other things.
And, finally, we can talk about the soaring beauty of Euclidean geometry and pure intellectual satisfaction with algebra. Shhh, stop. You will scare people.
So we’re not talking about math? We are, but we don’t call it math. According to Andy Holden, former head of the government’s equalization task force, mathematics sounds “academic and scary.”
What does it offer instead? Number. “Calling it math … sounds pretty conceptual,” he says. “Some people don’t understand conceptual things.”
But it is conceptual! That’s why it’s exciting: math is a beautiful and creative way to make sense of the universe. Calm down, Pythagoras. For most of us, these are bad memories of broken transports and shrinking shots: things we never used after fighting the GCSE. Haldane believes that we should focus on real-world mathematics, not scare people with the hypotenuse square. We need to convey the message that numbers matter, “because it’s important to be able to live our lives in a financially sustainable way, making choices about money and savings, spending, pensions and jobs,” he said.
Pfft He takes something exciting and makes it deadly boring. Everything is very good for Ferma and Lagrange, but not everyone can be excited about the calculation. Four out of five adults have low functional math skills, according to a 2014 National Numeracy report, and nearly 17 million adults in the UK have numerical skills roughly equivalent to primary schools. We need to make mathematics more accessible to deal with this.
It all sounds like an intellectual snowflake to me. But “anxiety in math” is a real phenomenon: research at the University of Cambridge found that many children and adults experience “feelings of anxiety, fear, tension or discomfort when faced with a math problem,” even when they are good at math.
How can someone be scared of pi? This is so satisfying. No, you’re thinking about pie.
ha ha If we are rebranding mathematics, should we call algebra “the one with the letters” and trigonometry “the study of triangles”? Are quadratic equations a “Wordle number”? Good thinking. Government Commissioner for Social Mobility Catherine Birbalsing recently and controversially argued that girls do not do physics because of “hard math” – maybe she would like to tell them that it includes “interesting math” instead?
Say, “My improved math skills mean I now really understand my home budget!”
Don’t say, “With inflation close to 10 percent and wages at just 4.2 percent, you don’t have to be Rachel Riley to know something doesn’t match.”
Add Comment