Week Eight

I have a friend who is a fan of a blog which recently featured a letter to the editor about how daylight savings time is causing global warming. The writer seemed to believe that we had negotiated for the sun to hang around our corner of the earth for an extra hour a day for eight months a year, and those extra hours we adding up. Such anecdotes give us the notion that the general public is ignorant to put it bluntly and I think college students have a tendency to develop a superiority complex over much of the adult population. When we were talking in class, however, we seem to have determined that American adults really don't need that much math by our standards, but perhaps they are lacking in certain areas. I think they need general computing skills, for balancing a checkbook, cooking, and conversions, basic algebra for problem solving, basic trigonometry for assembly and construction, and a big one is skills for interpereting statistics. As evidenced above, anecdotes are powerful, but statistics can be just as potent. When people don't understand confidence intervals, survey biases , and margins of errror, the news that 50% of 9rd graders at the local high school have below-average grades in math could send a frenzy of panicked PTA members flying at the principal. Numbers can be scary as we are bombarded with information about political polls, the DOW, and the rising prevalence of diabetes, and without some basic mathematical understanding, it's all one can do not to go crazy. Math, ironically enough from our perspective in the craziness of exams, does a lot to maintain sanity in the real world.