To be slightly horrified at how poor my basic skills are?

[primrosesandmaths]

In my professional, graduate profession, I have just been told I have to work out something as a percentage.

I have no idea how to do it.

I shall google - it isn’t an advice thread as such, but my maths is just dire and I can’t help wondering if this is common or whether I am an imposter in my role.

I'm not trying to brag (I'm not a good mathematician by any stretch of the imagination), it's just that, having never been scared of maths, I've been able to get past the boring "find the answer to this sum" part and able to see some of the beauty behind it, and it's so sad that other people are excluded from that. Other people will probably feel just as sorry for me being unable to extract as much as they do from poetry or art.

STORM TREADER

That's how it was drilled into me. More like word association. I've just taught the kids the same.

I'm no mathematician, but an engineer, but I feel inspired by the idea that numbers can be viewed as platonic - there are prime numbers out there that we haven't discovered - and the proof that there are infinite prime numbers I find so clever and yet simple.

its the same with reading books - i 'see' the characters, i can go on their journey and have an image of how they look in my mind.
I know, from talking to dh and others that don't like reading fiction much, they dont 'see' it like this, they just see words on a page. ' i deal with facts not fiction' my dh said and i get that too!

i cant see the beauty of numbers as they actually scare me - when to multipy, when to divide how to measure makes me nervous.

Euler's identity, which links into a simple equation e (the number behind compound interest), imaginary numbers, Pi, and trigonometry - often quoted as an example of beauty in maths, and I can still remember my delight when I saw how branches of maths, which I'd been taught separately at school and had though were completely differentiated, were in fact all different ways of looking at the same thing, and you could just gambol through them as you wished.

We need to equip vastly more people with advanced maths at school, not fewer.

Yes, but we need to make sure they have the basics first. No point in trying to teach someone algebra if they don't know their times tables and prime numbers.

Perhaps we need different subjects in schools instead of an all-encompassing "maths". How about breaking it down into a "basic" qualification for everyone, with "higher maths" for those budding engineers, scientists, etc. That way, you're catering for those who struggle and who just need life skills, yet accommodating those who need Maths for a career.

People's minds work in different ways. I never really 'got' maths when at school, but I'd write down everything on hte board and show it to either my dad or my brother when I got home. It would take about one sentence from either of them for it to become crystal clear; they'd just approach it in a different way, but that way made sense to me while none of my teacher's approaches did.

My dad had the same experience when at prep school, but had to pass the Common Entrance, so his mum sent him to a Tutor one summer and this tutor just put things differently which made sense to dad. He became a very strong mathematician/logician/statistician.

I was with a group of friends a few years ago, and one of htem had brought another another friend with her, whom I had been to school with, but hadn't seen since we left. She said in general conversation "but Jux was a maths genius at school".......

I think those examples show that the approach makes a very big difference, in maths in particular, and is no one's fault. If your mind works in a different way to your teacher's you will find it harder, and if you have no one else whom you can ask for help of, then you may - mistakenly - think you simply can't do it. Chances are you're wrong!

Perhaps we need different subjects in schools instead of an all-encompassing "maths". How about breaking it down into a "basic" qualification for everyone, with "higher maths" for those budding engineers, scientists, etc.

Isn't that basically what we have? GCSE maths, particularly if you're not in a top stream will be every day mathematics, with some more challenging maths, and by A-Level, advanced concepts are there for the budding engineers and scientists

MERLY what's STORM TREADER? Sorry I can't work out what you're referring to.

i found the 'chunking' method hard to grasp, when my ds2 used to show me his homework books for maths i was like ' what?'
i showed him how i was taught and he was the same ' i dont get that'
he is a lot better at maths than i ever was, so it must have worked for him. ( they probably teach it all differently now though, this was 5 years ago since he did GCSEs at school and 10 years since primary school)

When that happens sideways I just think it is less than it would be at full price. And it is. Everyone is a winner.

No, I know what 10% is so just add it up.

Isn't that basically what we have? GCSE maths, particularly if you're not in a top stream will be every day mathematics, with some more challenging maths, and by A-Level, advanced concepts are there for the budding engineers and scientists

That was the impression I got - 3 levels of exam papers?

MereDintofPandiculation
No, I mean 90%, I got the terminology wrong! What is the term for the 5% divisions?

There isn't one, really. You'd say the top and bottom five centiles. The standard measure of dispersion about the median is the inter-quartile range. The 5% ends of the distribution are more often referred to for normally (or log-normally) distributed variables, where the arithmetic or geometric mean might be accompanied by the 95% confidence limits.

The standard measure of dispersion about the median is the inter-quartile range.

My first port of call with any data set I don't understand is a box and whisker plot which shows me the medians and quartiles and gives a good sense of the outliers. No assumptions that it's parametric, easily produced in a couple of seconds with R's "boxplot" function. I'm always amazed they're not more widely taught.

Box & whisker plots are certainly taught in most basic medical statistics courses. Because that's quite a formal setting, though, students will be told to work out the level of the data and - if the data are interval or ratio - produce a histogram and make a judgement regarding skew before deciding whether to do a box plot or an error plot.

I've never used R. We have a site licence for SPSS but used to get students to use PSPP (public domain) so they could use it at home without having to pay. Of course, it would always turn out that the very thing you wanted students to do was the one thing that PSPP did differently from SPSS.

The standard measure of dispersion about the median is the inter-quartile range. It is, but in the context of the post I was answering I was looking for something a bit more analagous to the +/- 1.96 sds that would encompass 95% of the population if the underlying distribution were something approximating to the normal. But I wasn't quite ready to try inventing a term for "two and a half centiles" so I stuck with 5% at each end.

Skiiltan Your post illustrates the point I made above, that median is good as a measure of the average, but that the mean, sd etc are easy to deal with mathematically so are what we use when we're trying to compare populations.

I can remember Box and Whisker plots being "invented". Quite an exciting new thing, on a par with the sorts of data visualisations now being done by people like David McCandless

I've never used R. We have a site licence for SPSS

Fifty years old this year, in fact. That's a long life for software. It was looking old when I first used it thirty-five years ago, but I presume it's evolved.

R rocks. But it's got a syntax only its authors could love.

R_User

There are certain aspects of maths which I need for daily life, like most people, budgeting, time, percentages etc but I have forgotten far more than I remember from school. I have no idea what to do with bracketed equations and even less with sin, cos and tan as it just has no useful baring on my personal daily life. I wish that schools would put better emphasis on getting the basics right with good functional skills rather than being lost in the subject as a whole.

Although I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint on getting the basics right, it does seem like a recipe for a very stripped down unimaginative curriculum

Maths - How to work out your change from the bus driver
English - How to write letters to the council about the bins
Physics - why you shouldn't put metal in the microwave

And so on

I wish that schools would put better emphasis on getting the basics right

Dumb schools for the proles.

Knowledge for the elite.

I wish that schools would put better emphasis on getting the basics right with good functional skills

So, in a slightly less sharp response: you'd be OK with Oxbridge, medical schools and the upper end of STEM education in the Russell Group being entirely inaccessible for pupils from state schools?

Or, alternatively, you'd be OK with there being a test taken at 11 which would mean that for those that failed it they would have no chance whatsoever of going into higher education? So bring back not just the 11+, but the 11+ circa 1970 with no provision for higher education whatsoever in the qualifications taken in the secondary schools?

Because you get that once people are doing your dumbed down "sorry, maths is too hard for you" courses (and their analogues), they don't have cat in hell's chance of being able to access higher education, because they won't have a cat in hell's chance of doing A Levels?

DH has a maths based career but he has a shocking grasp of ‘mental maths’. My SPaG leaves a lot to be desired. We are the same age and went to schools within 20 minutes drive of each other but they emphasised different skills.

I took an Advanced Calculus class from a professor who was a very good teacher, everyone said he was the best. Advanced Calculus at my university was a very advanced class for math majors, where we did a lot of proofs. There isn't a lot of arithmetic involved. One day, our professor was lecturing, and he said, "8 plus 5. Help me, people." Arithmetic and higher math are different skill sets. I liked math a lot better once it got past arithmetic. I'm terrible at doing arithmetic in my head, always have been.

I got three degrees- astronomy, physics, and math, and I got a master's degree in astronomy at one of the better astronomy programs in the US. I can't do long division- I've forgotten how. I don't think I've done it since grade school. That's what calculators and Google are for. I also vaguely remember learning about log tables in high school. I understand the concept of logarithms, but I wouldn't know what to do with a log table now. I haven't used one in over twenty years, you forget how to do some of these things.