Yesterday the title of an opinion piece in the New York Times Online caught my attention. I won't tell you what I thought about the piece. I'll say that I agreed with some of it and disagreed with some of it, but I won't tell you my ratio of agree to disagree or the specifics, because I promised to only talk shop for a paragraph. But the piece does bring up a dilemma that anyone involved in teaching or promoting mathematics has to deal with, and that is that an awful lot of math that people learn is not really all that useful to an awful lot of people who learn it. Some math teachers will tell you that it doesn't matter, because mathematics is not about specifics but about learning to be a problem solver. Some will tell you that math is a gateway subject that will open up doors of opportunity to students who don't yet know if they want to close those doors on themselves. Some will tell you that yes, it's a problem, and the whole system needs to be changed. Some will tell you that no, most people don't need this mathematics, but they'll still be better employees/citizens/consumers of data if they are mathematically literate than if they are not.
Most math textbooks, though, have a simpler solution, and that's the Real World Problem.* I myself tend to write ridiculously unrealistic mathematical situations every once in awhile, but that's more about being a storyteller and trying to find creative ways to pose problems that hopefully are just inherently mathematically interesting. These are not Real World Problems - they're just math problems with a tongue-in-cheek** premise. A Real World Problem is one that takes a completely decontextualized mathematical skill (like subtracting negative numbers) and forces it into a "real life" context to convince you that the decontextualized mathematical skill is actually useful in everyday life. For instance:
Mt. Kilimanjaro is 5893 meters above sea level at its summit. Death Valley in California is 86 meters below sea level at its lowest point. How many meters apart are the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro and the lowest point in Death Valley?
ANSWER: Not enough information. This is a very poorly worded question. But I made it up, so it's okay.*** But there are Real World Problems like this that you would pretty much never solve in real life populating the homework sets in most mathematics textbooks.
There is, however, no excuse for this one, which I did not make up; I stumbled across it today, and it made me laugh out loud, and I had to share it:
Salt is important in several superstitions including the one that says you should sprinkle salt on your doorstep to keep out evil spirits. The United States sold 25.03 million tons of salt in 2008, a decrease of 8.07 million tons from 1996. How many tons of salt did the United States sell in 1996?
That is what is wrong with math education.
Good thing I'm out to fix it.
* I know it looks like I'm still talking shop, but it's a different, more-general-audience type of shop. I didn't lie.
** That just made me wonder where the phrase "tongue in cheek" comes from. According to this website, putting your tongue in your cheek makes you wink, and they encourage the reader to try it, and I did, and it didn't make me wink. Also, according to this same website, the definition of "tongue in cheek" really boils down to "to be taken with a pinch of salt," which is an amusingly unhelpful parsing of a figure of speech.
*** And if you had a lot of time on your hands and some knowledge of spherical geometry, I'll bet it could be a really interesting question.
2 comments:
I would have loved a math electives class like finances. But, the same argument could me made for any other subject in K-12. Why don't we have a Journalism and International Politics requirement instead of English and Social Studies? Because, that's too specific. And...science and math were invented together? Ugh.
I hate the word problems that give a long lesson before setting up the problem. A short one is okay and sometimes interesting, but having to wade through the geography question to get to the point can be frustrating. A silly, funny question would be refreshing!
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