Zeros at Math

I am embarrassed to admit that I am one of the many people in the United States who is functionally innumerate. Many people are fine with it, but I hate the struggle of having to figure out in my mind a 15 percent tip or the price of something that is under the sign "40 percent off."

When I was in elementary school, the New Math was the method they taught arithmetic. I struggled in pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus. It's easy to shrug off these skills by saying that I will never sew a round tablecloth, so I don't need to know about the circumference of a circle, but the reality is that not knowing math well beyond grade school arithmetic has hindered me professionally. The irony is that I've worked in finance and accounting and am not, in principle, intimidated by numbers. I just had a problem understanding higher math and its applications. When I was in college, I tried, whenever possible, to get math professors who were clearly passionate about their subject. I still struggled with statistics, but I had the best math professor for that course.)

Fortunately, I am an open-minded person and about 20 years ago I came across a PBS series called College Algebra In Simplest Terms. This series was the brainchild of Sol Garfunkel, who is affiliated with a math consortium. I was hooked from the start. Garfunkel explained how algebra is used in things with which everyone is familiar: fireworks, boats, car accidents. In each episode he would come up with a formula to figure out how professionals determine how to design things.

In today's edition of The New York Times, Garfunkel and David Mumford argued for the need to combine math and its applications. Why haven't educators and the high priced consultants they hire think of that before? Why should parents have to spend extra money on math tutoring simply because the powers that be at most schools can't or won't make sure that kids are learning math skills that will help them in their personal and professional lives?

I am really proud that my son, Alex, loves numbers and shapes. He knew shapes before his cohorts at his first preschool, but didn't know the oval because it wasn't in the Disney Learning Series's "Winnie The Pooh's Shapes and Sizes," which we watched many, many times. He knew it, along with the trapezoid, by the time he was about three and a half. Thank you, Melissa and Doug for your wonderful shapes puzzle! I worked with him on numbers in English, and he learned to count to ten in Hebrew, thanks to the Oy, Baby video. I am very happy that Alex had that early exposure to math. Hopefully, he won't struggle with it as I did.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/opinion/how-to-fix-our-math-education.html