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 blaming the curriculum and the general climate of acceptance for all kinds of ignorance.

Why shouldn’t?

Nah my maths is shocking too at this point

I was reviewing someone else's work and discovered a major maths mistake (which changed an estimated saving from c £16m to £9m. When I pointed it out a v senior manager said that the work had been approved by some committees and a professor - so it wasn't wrong (patronising mansplainer) I persisted. It is wrong. So - you're not alone with your lack of basic maths skills.

How do you calculate the number of units in that bottle of wine

Experiential learning. Definitely.

OP, almost everyone uses Excel worksheets to work out things like that, don't worry. Most other people can't just "do it" either, they just have computer skills rather than maths skills.

Even with a computer doing the work for you, it's incredibly useful to have the basic understanding. Using excel blindly and not even questioning the output means for example, glaringly obvious mistakes due to a typo in a formula or similar aren't spotted.

I'm 57 and my basic maths teaching was pretty good (I'm pre-calculator).

We were taught long division/multiplication/percentages/fractions etc.

We also used to sit and recite the times tables. Which has never left me.

I’m not offended. I completely agree and I don’t understand it myself. How can I have such strong concepts and understanding of some things and such poor ones with others? I honestly don’t know. I’ve been taught how to work out a percentage numerous times and it is as if my brain just turns to sawdust - I can’t retain what I have been taught so every time I’m like a five year old.

Mean or median:

Look at wealth : a few crazily rich outliers could make for a mean that makes everyone look richer and your own wealth look below average. Show the median wealth and you might find yourself closer to it, making you feel less of a financial loser.

As a more concrete example Londoners might prefer to show the median wage earned to show why government still needs to provide benefits there despite a high average wage that makes the rest of the country gasp.

Far better explanations are available: probably on Khan Academy!

I have to add that my “professional profession” has nothing to do with maths and even I can work out percentages and maths problems because the basics were drilled in me.

OP can’t because she wasn’t taught all that property.

I do a job where numbers - and percentages in particular - are our bread and butter. I still always forget how to calculate a percentage when I have to do it manually.

I have a decent numerical awareness so I know for example if I wanted to find out 56 as a percent of 215 it'd be around 25% but I always forget how to actually do the calculations

I remember doing a test to assign students jobs in an IT company. It focused on logic and whether you could do long multiplication and division without a calculator.
Turned out everyone who had done double maths A level could no longer do those. Whereas I could still remember how and could do the mental arithmetic at speed. So the test assigned people pretty much in inverse proportion to their skills, and I spent the year honing my blagging and persuasion skills to get other students to do programming for me.

Understanding what different statistical tests show you or what stats mean is more important than the details of the calculation, yet stats in particular is too often badly taught by mathematicians caught up in the equations.

I am not surprised and it will only get worse as people use apps to work out simple sums, I can work out percentages but do have to do simple maths calculations in my work. Who hasn't done a simple sum and checked it on a calculator.

This is one of the reasons that we moved back to Ireland, I think the education system here is generally better. School children don't specialise as early as they do in the UK, so for the Leaving Cert everyone does English, Irish, Maths, plus four or five other subjects. I was surprised when I moved to London as a graduate at the number of people that I met or worked with who were incredibly intelligent and good at their jobs but had weird gaps in their general knowledge and abilities and it was usually because they had given up some subjects very early in their school career. Not their faults, you have to make choices quite early on in the UK school system (or at least the English system, I'm not sure whether other countries in the UK differ).

Also, I didn't realise it at the time, but the primary school system here is much slower and more focused on basics like grammar, spelling, maths. DS had already done a couple of years of primary in the UK and while the UK curriculum was ahead of the Irish one, DS's grasp of what he had learned was a bit shaky. The slower pace in Ireland suited him much better.

Mere I've never understood what circumstances Median Averages might be helpful in

The most common example is salaries.

A factory employs 10 part-time machinists on £10kpa each. The owner-manager earns £100,000.

Total pay costs are £200k.
Median salary is £10k.
Mode salary is £10k.
Mean salary is a shade under £20k.

If someone asks what the "average" salary is at the factory, median or mode tell you far more about earnings there than mean does.

Any good website reccomendations to brush up on basic maths?

Khan Academy

@ChardonnaysPrettySister

Should have balanced it with some literacy.

I've just done our businesses Gender Pay Gap reporting, i remembered without prompt how to calc Mean & Median, but i did have to refresh my % calculation skills too!

I knew it all at school/college but I'm one of those people that loses skills like that if i don't use them regularly - too reliant on Excel and calculators i assume.

I have always struggled with maths. I had tutors at home too and I just cannot grasp basic things. In work I am not alone, but it doesn’t seem to matter as people either use google, their phone calculator, or just stick it into Excel. I remember maths at school just felt like rushing from one thing to another and I always felt like I was playing catch up.

The thing is, if I did sit there and try and do long division on a piece of paper for example, my manager would tell me to stop wasting time when you can get the answer via google in 20 seconds

Even with a computer doing the work for you, it's incredibly useful to have the basic understanding. Using excel blindly and not even questioning the output means for example, glaringly obvious mistakes due to a typo in a formula or similar aren't spotted.

Entirely agree with this (why I said both were good skills to have!), it's no good if you can't look at the outcome on a spreadsheet and go "hang on, that's gone wrong", but for anything outside of round figures, it'd take most people ages to work out the exact example, especially if they're decimal percentages. Most people wouldn't be able to work out, say, 27.8% of £24,578.40 (should the need to do so randomly arise) using "common sense" as TIRF says.

The explanations of median averages are very good, thank you! It does make sense to exclude outliers.

I still think it's a conspiracy though

I have to add that my “professional profession” has nothing to do with maths and even I can work out percentages and maths problems because the basics were drilled in me.

OP can’t because she wasn’t taught all that property.

You are aware that people learn and retain information differently, right? I sailed through education, brilliant grades without trying etc. However, i still forget 'basics' if they are not something i use regularly. It's nothing to do with whether it was drilled in to me, if i don't use, i lose.

Everyone else loses skills unless they are burned in by repetition. Recent decades of schooling has decided to dump memorisation and this is the result.

It’s a work in process, English not being my mother tongue.

I am 75 years old, have a humanities degree, and I can't work out percentages either.
But I CAN do long division and multiplication - of pounds, shillings and pence. Just imagine how useful that is! Oh, yes, and of stones, pounds and ounces...

I understand mean and median but not mode. As in for median, if bill gates moved into my village everyone would look a lot richer if you just did the mean so median is more accurate. But I do not know how to work it out. Or mode. Or anything.