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.

People are not taught simple sums

BODMAS/PEDMAS are relatively recent naming. What it refers to is the ordering of processes in mathematics (eg inside the brackets is processed before outside the brackets).

ie its basic arithmetic rules which have been in the NC since day 1 but with a different name

"The majority of people have more than the average number of legs" (if you measure the average by the mean)

.How on earth d'you work that out though?! Who's wandering around out there on thirty legs upping the average of the population?!

It's the other way round - it's the very small number of people who've lost a leg reducing the mean to 1.9999999999....

When adults have to pause and check before doing calculations it is most likely to be lack of practice.

Any skill or knowledge area needs to be practiced. If you spend ten years never looking at percentages you may well need to double check how to do them. That does not mean you were not taught properly it simply means you need to remind yourself of the skills you were taught.

Working out percentages is one thing that's stuck in my head. 😊

If you only use the mean, I have an above average number of:

Arms
Legs
Fingers
Toes
Eyes
Ears
Ovaries
Fallopian tubes
Kidneys
Spleens
etc

(I actually have 1.1 ovaries)

We're slagging off the mean but it does have its uses especially when quoted in association with standard deviation - which is to say "how average this average is". In many real-life situations the standard deviation is more important than the mean, e.g. when you're talking about how much pasta is in a "500g" bag. A factory can afford to put on average less in each bag if the precision of the machine means the standard deviation is very small: 502+/-2 v 505+/-5.

It's definitely education.
Dp is forrin, and left school at 16 with no "qualifications".
His maths, geography, historical dates and basic scientific knowledge is much much better than mine.
He has to help ds with year 7 spag and maths because I can't do it.
I went to shit schools and learned pretty much nowt. Everything I know is from novels and the telly. Or maybe I'm just thick! I would like to get better at Maths, definitely.

Thank you mere, I still can’t do percentages though!

Sometimes, we forget stuff. If we don't use it, that's natural.
I was sh*t hot at maths at school and uni. I also really enjoyed a really difficult equation, but these day I look at my 11 year olds maths homework and I think 'bollocks - I can't do that'. This is because I haven't actually done any real maths for two decades.
Just do what you said - google it, and go from there.

I got an E in my maths GCSE, yet I can do percentages easy peasy and my functional maths skills are decent, I didn't go to a whole lot of my maths lessons in school because I bloody hated it and was lumped in with the children who ate glue and masturbated under the desks. It's not about the failings of the educational system. Although don't ask me about Pi.

We have to do % a lot in my job but a lot of the people we interview struggle with it. I think you forget after leaving school.

MrsHathaway But a median can be quoted with quartiles, or perhaps the top and bottom quintiles (so that 90% of the population lie between the bottom quintile and the top quintile), and that'll give a better characterisation in a highly asymmetric distribution. I think the real advantage of the mean is that the mathematics of its behaviour is relatively simple, so the real benefit comes when you are trying to see whether your machine is still putting the same amount in the bag as it was doing 6 months ago or whether it's getting more erratic in its amounts and you need to think about a service.

Although don't ask me about Pi.

Today is Pi day. Being the 14th of March, or 3/14 in American.

DD's school have a competition running, bake a cake or pie and decorate it with something to do with Pi. (I think it is just so the maths department gets to eat the cakes )

It seems a bit unfair...I'm at the other end of this spectrum in that I can do everyday maths without thinking about it, but have no clue about grammar.

I know what noun/adjective/verb/adverb mean but anything beyond that, including subject/object of sentences is totally mysterious.

The fact you have to constantly use language, and you can be fluent without understanding what you know, means that it isn't likely apparent to anyone that I have this chasm in my basic knowledge.

In other news you can now type in works eg. "what is 25 percent of 67" and google will simply return the answer....

DD's school have a competition running, bake a cake or pie and decorate it with something to do with Pi. (I think it is just so the maths department gets to eat the cakes

Good Lord. They are human after all.

I can't do percentages either - I have to ask google. It's not just you

I love pi. The first program I write in any new language I learn is always one that calculated pi using random numbers...it tests speed and performance as a bonus.

We have a culture that says it's OK (or even a bit to be admired) to be bad at maths,
Daughter of a maths teacher - totally agree.
My mum used to get pupils brought in to parents' evening whose parents said really proudly "I was never any good at Maths, she won't be either".

“We” brits are notoriously poor at mathematics. As long as you don’t work in a medical role of any sort, you should be ok working out the questions that are part of your job.

Back to percentages, I think that a lot of people don't really understand them. They can manipulate them at a basic level but they don't know what they are. I'm sympathetic because I don't understand currency or time zones but I can work out how much to get out in Euro for a holiday and what time to ring DH when he's in business in America.

If you don't fundamentally get what a percentage is then no amount of practice will make that understanding click. You might get better at calculating. First you need to understand multiplication and division and how to manipulate expressions within an equation.

People on Reddit last week were amazed by a "trick" that 7% of 50 is the same as 50% of 7 which is easier to work out. But um that's literally how multiplication works.

7 × 1/100 × 50 = 50 × 1/100 × 7 = 7 × 50 × 1/100 etc etc.

To do percentage calculations you need to translate words to maths:

345 is what percentage of 2649?
345 = x/100 × 2649
345÷2649 = x/100
100×345÷2649 = x = 13

My 6yo is being taught to translate "is" and "makes" and "leaves" (etc) to "=" and they just add operations as they go along. I don't think our generation was taught this explicitly; we had to work it out for ourselves by osmosis or something!

@TeenTimesTwo - It most definitely is so the maths department can eat cakes. I didn't know it was Pi day! To me, March 14th is just good old steak and blowjob day, or so FaceFuck says.

Maybe it helps to think of percentages as just a fraction? It's easy to envisage say, three-quarters of something isn't it? A percentage is just x hundredths of something. 75% is seventy-five hundredths of something.

You just do what you'd do with a fraction. Mentally divide by four (cut apple into four pieces) then multiply by three = three quarters of an apple. For percentages, divide by one hundred and multiply by seventy-five, or whatever the % is that you need to find.

Sorry that's too long but I was analysing my mental processes :-)

quimreaper Zipping to end of thread to say I did a DIY course at the Good Life Centre in south London and it changed my life! They told me how to drill, put things up, regrout and seal tiles, make emergency rawl plugs out of matches (so useful just the other day when I was changing door handles and the plate holes didn’t align with the old screw holes). I am now ‘the envy of my friends’ okay maybe not, but I have a badass hammer drill (they told me what one to buy), and am renovating third house. It gave me a real platform to jump off and I have a bette understanding of what various trades do etc.

I also went back and did a very maths based degree in 30s - I did an access tutoring class to pass the tests to get in and when the going got tough got a few one on one tutoring hours. I now work with excel daily after being an airy fairy arts person in 20s. Part time excel based job now funds extra curricular airy-fairness which is nice.

I do feel like as a woman there were a lot of practical avenues i wasn’t encouraged down and so in my early 20s I was just sitting like a lemon with a great knowledge of 20th c French literature and fuck all else .

Adult education, YouTube videos, MOOCs - changed my life.

Although don't ask me about Pi. You have an 7inch diameter cake to be iced. The length of the rectangle of icing to go around the sides is Pi times the diameter, ie 7 Pi. And the area of the circle on top is 3.5 3.5 Pi (3.5 is the radius, ie half the diameter) so a little over 12 Pi.

Lots of rhymes to help you remember PI - the one that sticks in my mind begins "Sir I have a rhyme excelling...." 3.14158.....

Also useful when you have a recipe for an 8inch diameter cake but you only have square tins - which tin should you use to get near enough the same depth so you don't have to adjust cooking time?

Morphene you will know the way to use subjects and objects, you just won't understand the labels (otherwise your sentences would make no sense).
But the inability to label parts of speech seems to be moving into the "I was never any good at it and it didn't do me any harm" among parents, as well.
Various tips for you:
If you can replace it with I, he or she and it sounds right - it's a subject
If you can replace it with me, him, or her and it sounds right - it's an object.
In English the noun at the start of the sentence is (usually) the subject and the one at the end is (usually) an object because we have a Subject Verb Object word order.
And though this does not help with a lot of verbs, usually the Subject is "doing" and the Object is "done to".
So The boy hit his sister - boy is subject, sister is object
But we have a lot of verbs that are not very action-ish e.g.
The boy sees his mum (same slots but the verb is not very "do" ish)
The boy feels unhappy (same slots but even less do-ish).
Any help?

I am also completely hopeless at basic maths! (and no not the kind of 'hopeless' where I can't do arithmetic but get up to all sorts of creative larks with theoretical physics, more the kind where e.g. I confidently decided the other day that 2/3 must equal 60% because 2x30 is 60...was gently disabused of this reasoning by a kind soul a few hours later when I thought I'd quickly check whether 2x30 was indeed 60).
Was also flummoxed by the 'count on your fingers' at school as am quite impressively undergifted with the spatial awareness.
Unsurprisingly music theory totally mystified me, scraped my G5 by one mark (blessedly charitable examiner) am powerhouse, me

Think you just need memory and familiarity to navigate basic maths in life. But then it does require practice or you'll lose it if you didn't understand it in the first place.