our kids can’t do math

In the 1960s Bronx when I was in high school, calculators weren’t allowed on tests. Because the calculator had not yet been invented.

I actually learned math in JHS 82 in middle school. That’s when my friends and I calculated baseball batting averages and pitcher ERA averages over lunch. At the time, newspapers only featured weekday league leaders, so we did the math for everyone on our favorite teams, the Yankees and the Mets. Today, watching a ball game on television instantly recalculates all sorts of statistics you never heard of when you were a kid. It should go up and the ERA should go down when the pitcher is in bad shape.

Children today have calculators and computers with unimaginable computing power and speed. They just type in numbers. As an old dinosaur, I like to balance my checkbook unaided to keep my mind sharp, but some days I just don’t care and let Excel handle the numbers. I’ve used algebra and geometry in a variety of projects, and very rudimentary math skills probably could have gotten me through life. I haven’t used trigonometry or calculus since high school.

So why should children study math?

This is an important question. According to the latest report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, school suspensions due to COVID have resulted in his 4th grade and her 8th grade math scores dropping in nearly every state and demographic group, with some states shows a sharp drop in scores. Only 36% of 4th graders and 26% of 8th graders were rated as proficient in mathematics. In New York, 4th grade scores were significantly lower, with only 28% of students rated as proficient, slightly higher than the 8th grade national average. It was the lowest score of any New York student.

The more vulnerable students lagged further behind their peers. A study included in the test found that only half of her fourth graders, who had poor math performance, had regular access to a computer in the 2020-21 school year, and a third had quiet time to do their school homework. Reported no location. Black and Latinx students, who had already scored lower than their white and Asian counterparts on previous exams, experienced a sharp COVID-related decline. Test results and research suggest that there could be a sharp increase in high school dropouts and a widening opportunity gap in the near future.

Reading comprehension also declined, but reading comprehension became easier to recover. Mathematics is sequential, so you can’t perform increasingly complex operations without learning the basics. During the 2021-2022 school year, the federal government provided more than $120 billion (approximately $2,400 per student) to address the COVID decline, but the federal government Funding for the restoration expires in 2024, and the highly partisan Congress may not be able to allocate the billions of dollars that are still needed.

So why should kids study math when technology can do the math for them?

In New York State, the Mathematics Learning Standards emphasize that the goal is for students to understand problems and be patient in solving them. Infer abstractly and quantitatively. Build actionable arguments and criticize the reasoning of others. Model with mathematics. Calculation skills, also called mathematics, are important. Because in order to do these things the student must be comfortable with numbers and be able to “read” mathematics. But broader “thinking skills” that transfer to school and other areas of life are most important.

In addition to learning mathematics and learning how to calculate, students will learn how to think logically, identify and state problems clearly, plan, and determine appropriate strategies for finding solutions to problems. , learn how to draw conclusions based on evidence. Numeric in this case. Plus math helps you keep score even when a calculator isn’t available.measure with math It helps you make and check money, payments and shopping, time and distance. We use math when cooking or baking, balancing checkbooks, or planning or building home improvements. If you know the math, you’ll know when your bill is right and you won’t be dependent on others.

Some people prefer their children not to be able to do math. It’s easier to fool them. You can pay less and charge more. They don’t understand why climate change and rising sea levels are such a threat, and why the Republican claim that the 2020 election was stolen is ridiculous.

It may be better if children can’t do math, but their lives and our society as a whole are much worse.

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