Can a 16 year old now function without any arithmetic skills at all?

[Cherrypi]

Can a teenager get through life doing no arithmetic at all? Now there's not much cash, less cooking, Google maps to calculate the next bus, money left after bills calculated for you on banking apps, no clocks etc. Has passive mental arithmetic almost been eliminated?

You can get through life not doing much arithmetic.

if you don’t have much of a sense of number (eg that a thousand is bigger than a hundred by quite a lot) it’s very hard.

most people don’t have enough money that they can just spend it without thinking how much they have left.

How could anyone get to 16 and know nothing about numbers whatsoever?

At no time in history could you get through life without basic arithmetic.

Until now? They've obviously been exposed to 12 years of maths lessons but it's whether they can get by without using it outside of that. I don't think an adult living on there own could.

There’s only less cooking if you’re willing to risk your health by eating shit. Living on ready meals and eating out isn’t adult behaviour.

Mostly serious special needs/brain injury.

the type of special needs that’s non verbal and can only communicate using AAC and has mental age of anywhere between 6 months to three years.

Without the subject Maths yes, without functional numeracy I think you'd struggle.

Ive managed my whole life and high paid jobs with dyscalculia. Id love to understand it but its a big blur to me. I mostly use AI these days.

Yes they will be seriously disadvantaged and need extra help but they won't curl up in a corner and die. No different then adults who can't read

I think a sixteen year old could easily do no calculations in a week but probably not avoid reading or writing.

Well it depends what you mean by “calculations”. If you mean formal, maths type questions then yes. But we are calculating all the time. For example, how much time do we have before we need to leave the house, how much more money do I need to buy those trainers, how many sweets is a fair share for everyone etc etc

I agree that you read every day, but writing isn’t necessary although most sixteen year olds write because they are on social media. They don’t use a pen though

It depends if this is a real life situation or a hypothetical musing. and whether they do have some limited skill or completely illiterate when it comes to number. I’m hopeless at mental arithmetic but I have my phone with me all the time so it doesn’t matter.

Even with all the available tools I think it’s important to have at least some idea of what the answer should be. It only takes a digit left out or a decimal point in the wrong place to get a wildly wrong answer.

Yes they could. I'm over three times that age (49) and working that out is the hardest mental arithmetic I'm capable of. Hope I got it right. Point is, you don't really need any more. I daresay you're a fully functional adult in spite of confusing "there"and "their" - normally it would be a cheap shot to point that out, but on this thread it's pretty relevant. Ideally we'd all have mastered the three R's by 16, but we haven't and yet we cope. (Obviously, you're not a proofreader and I'm not an engineer.)

You don't need exam level arithmetic/ maths but functional life skill level.
Which is cheaper the one with a price reduction or the one with 15% off? If it's bogof how much cheaper is it. Can you measure something and work out how to fit it in a space. You need an idea of numbers to use a calculator.
Most trade jobs need arithmetic.

I’d be very cautious about using AI for this. Copilot once told me 1.15 was bigger than 1.2!

Ex maths teacher.

a surprisingly high number of people are functionally innumerate. There are regular surveys of using numeracy in every day life and percentages and fractions are notoriously difficult.

Research paper:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5784045/

Old article but still relevant
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/07/a-fifth-of-uk-adults-have-forgotten-how-to-do-fractions-or-percentages-mathematics-english-science?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

It will severely curtail their options and will make their life more expensive if they can't do simple things like compare prices, check their bank statements, work out basic fractions/percentages to decide quantity/size of food items required etc causing more waste, etc., prepare household budgets, work out if they can afford rent/mortgage etc. Obviously also curtail career/job options as even the simplest of jobs often require a degree of arithmetic, i.e. tradesmen need to do basic calculations when deciding quantities of materials to order, price up quotes and raise invoices, chefs need it to decide on how much foodstuff to order and price up menus, etc.

That's really bad. I think if you then asked it "Are you sure?" it would recalculate and get it right, but you have to wonder why AI makes up crap on the first place when the right answer is easily verifiable, and then waits for you to call it out.

I did, and it tried to justify it to me on the basis that 15 is bigger than 2 😬 The thing to remember is that these are language models so what it’s actually doing mostly is guessing which word comes next in a sequence, rather than actually computing the calculations or verifying facts.

Well it would be much harder and less fun to try to get through life without a few basic in arithmetic.

playing board games
budgeting
understanding percentages eg in medical scenarios,
measuring - that would exclude careers or hobbies in dressmaking, carpentry etc
cooking - working out how to get the components of a meal ready at the same time. Obviously would exclude working at a chef.
cash - if you ever pay in cash, how would you know if you have been given the wrong change

I see, thank you. I was picturing AI as a sort of helpful little humanoid assistant scurrying off to look up the answer to whatever the question is, but now I see that's not how it works. 😀

That's very interesting. I am worse at (school) maths than anyone I've ever met, and from my point of view there are three kinds of maths. The first is the straightforward, intuitive kind: two plus two equals four. The second kind - which for me includes times tables, along with fractions/ percentages/ averages - is not difficult to understand but is for some reason very difficult to memorize beyond short term cramming for exams. We could perform these operations (some easily, some effortfully) if we had the rules written down in front of us, but that would be "cheating". The third kind is the sort of highly abstract concepts that many brains simply cannot begin to comprehend no matter how patiently and frequently they are explained. Algebra obviously belongs here, and I think square roots probably do too, along with the buttons on the calculator that most of us never use (cos, tan, sin etc.)

The problem with the school system as I see it is that it continually forces conceptually challenging maths onto brains which are not wired to comprehend it, while placing too much emphasis on rote memorization.

The kind of functional numeracy one needs in day to day life - recipes, timetables, cash, budgeting - would indeed be hard to manage without. I've put this in the category of straightforward, intuitive maths because I've never met anybody who was entirely incapable of it, even though some of us nay have to resort to counting on our fingers!

Op have they got sen ?
Poor working memory ?

Can they read well ?

It's hard to say without context ?

My own maths is very poor and I get by just fine

Probably though brings more chance of being ripped off.