to think that BODMAS/BIDMAS is a pile of pish devised to keeps children busy?

[duchesse]

And designed to palliate poor notation.

I see about 6 threads a week from parents baffled by their children's homework. It puts me in a rage. If I'd written such poorly punctuated sums out as the ones these beleaguered parents are having to deal with when I was back at school I'd have been in detention every week. Yet these are inexplicably set as homework.

Can anybody tell me if learning these stupid rules (rather than learning proper notation including brackets from the get-go) can actually help children at all in any way? Or is it, as DH suspects, merely a nifty way of generating activities that can easily be marked? DH has an Oxbridge degree in maths and Phd in phsyics btw and also cannot see why the feck this is being taught.

There are things denigrating maths doing the rounds on facebook etc regularly. Why do people think this is OK? Why aren't people claiming that being able to read beyond infant reading schemes is a waste of time or who needs to be able to write anyway? It's a really strange cultural thing that needs to be reversed. No wonder other countries are light years ahead in STEM subjects.

Well this Cambridge-educated research scientist thinks OP's DH is being daft. The order of operations is absolutely integral (no maths pun intended) to mathematics, physics, computing and probably a whole host of other disciplines. It's as fundamental as understanding the point behind 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves'.

DrCoconut I have been saying this ever since I came into teaching 7 years ago.

I want to shout at parents at parents evening who sit there and say 'oh don't worry I was never very good at maths you must get it from me' - all this does is give children a green light to not making any effort to try and improve.

This is worth a look at if you do have children/students who are convinced they can't do maths

www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zpssyrd

I definitely did BODMAS at school AND I have an Oxbridge degree! Wowsers!

(jean, while I don't say Oxbridge in RL, I think a number of people around MN use it to maintain some small amount of privacy about where they went to uni!)

DH is not a teacher, he is a research scientist. He does not and has never used BODMAS to his memory and yet he uses maths (and yes, the really complicated stuff, not the arithmetic!) daily, and favours the use of brackets for clarity.

Perhaps he could come on here, then? And explain how he has consistently gone through life to date, ignorant of BIDMAS principles, to the point he always writes 2x2 as 2(x2)? To follow up, he can then confirm to us that in his life doing "complicated" maths, he reads 2x2 from left-to-right, and reads it the same way as (2x)2. Must be hell for people working with him. I'm amazed he did well enough (despite the errors he would have made through misreading questions) on his A-level papers to do a maths degree!

I can only assume that the rules of BODMAS are so ingrained inthe mind of the OP's DH that he is using it all the time without realising that is what he is doing. The mind boggles otherwise.

I am in my 50s BYW and did BODMAS - though we might have called it something else (someone mentioned order of expressions, that rings a bell)

Oh and to the poster who said
Most computer languages assume BODMAS. If your DCs are ever going to do any sort of coding or computer programming then they'll need to know it.
You are absolutely right. But I have recently started working in a language I had never done before that does not apply BODMAS but uses Left to Right instead. My face was when I discovered that!

On the Oxbridge thing - on a quick google and picking some random RG group and non RG group universities the number of undergraduates for all bar one of the uni's I picked (about 10) are in the region of 3-4000 undergraduates starting each year.

Oxford and Cambridge are exactly the same.

The one which was more with 9000 was Manchester but I know that is one of the largest in Uni's in the country.

So the use of Oxbridge may make them a bit more anoymous but it seems a bit pointless!

He probably did learn it as Order of Operations. He was at very traditional schools.

Noodle, I can categorically tell you that there are not all that many Oxbridge graduates around here.

I am older than time in Mumsnet terms, and learned BODMAS. If you don't know the order of operations how can you possibly do maths?

Oh, and I would love to know what Oxbridge college the OP's Dp went to.

Does he object to all aides memoire or just that one?

I think it's perfectly clear that OP's DH went to Oxford

DrCoconut Absolutely. My heart sinks whenever I hear people saying they "just don't/can't do maths". A similar comment about English or words would be ridiculous but it's seen as totally reasonable to just write off numeracy as "not for me" and not try to improve.

Btw, as an "Oxbridge" maths graduate, I'm certain OP's DH is well aware of order of operations. He just might not have been taught it as BODMAS.

Because Cambridge mathematicians actually understand maths?

Noodle, I can categorically tell you that there are not all that many Oxbridge graduates around here

How would you even know that, if they are also being so anonymous to protect their privacy?

How many of us listen to our car engine when changing gear? Or consciously search for a biting point and 'clutch control' when doing a hill start.

We all learned those things but 20 or 30 years later how many of us do it consciously.

Any one using maths will use BIDMAS / BODMAS / order of operations but won't necessarily remember that they are doing that.

Just like we don't often remember learning to count, or learning how to multiply. I certainly don't remember those things.

Oxbridge graduates on Mumsnet are like pieces of the true cross or people in that post office in Dublin............

Why even the need to mention the uni. Just saying a degree and Phd in Maths would show his level of competence in the subject. The uni was pretty irrelevant.

In the US, I learned PPMDAS. My math teacher said, "Pretty Please My Dear Aunt Sally."
Parenthesis
Powers
Multiplication
Division
Addition
Subtraction

I started high school in 1967 and the first thing we were taught in maths was the acronym Bless My Dear Aunt Sally to help us remember the order of operations. Don't know how we coped with indices though

Which language is that 5foot5 ? (Interested)

I have a maths degree, but don't remember learning BODMAS, although I'm sure I must have done. I am well aware of it now as my DD has been taught it and I've seen many posts on Facebook!

I think most mathematicians automatically use some aspects of it without thinking about it, but for some of the Facebook examples, I think everyone's life would be made a lot easier if we just inserted a few brackets rather than trying to trick people who are not sure of the rules! I always use brackets in Excel just in case, as I wouldn't totally trust the software to do what I wanted.

OP, are you sure that your dh doesn't in fact have an Uxbridge degree in maths? I have two degrees in maths, one from Oxford and one from Cambridge (the second is a postgrad degree) and I can see the point of BODMAS. Perhaps your DH wasn't concentrating in algebra lectures...