It was great news for Rhode Island recently. General
Dynamics Electric Boat has been awarded a $17.6 billion contract to build ten Virginia-class
attack submarines and the Quonset Point facility will be adding 450 jobs. Some
commuting workers from Massachusetts may benefit as well.
This is consistent with President Obama’s pledge to build
the economy from “the middle out.” The wages from these jobs would inject an
additional $30 million into the local economy with beneficial ripple effects
(the “multiplier”) boosting barbers and bakers and candlestick makers.
But not so fast. Once of the most common positions on the
Electric Boat website is a “QP Inside Machinist.” This job is described as follows:
“Set up, program editing and operation of CNC milling and
turning centers. Verifying part configuration to plan requirements using
various high tolerance precision measuring tools; must be able to work
independently and with minimum supervision.”
From the list of qualifying requirements, this one stands out:
Strong mathematical skills in geometry & trigonometry preferred.
Oops. How skilled are our recent high school grades in math?
Are they ready for the rigors of the workplace? Or, rather, have they succumbed
to our cultural aversion to math?
In Hollywood, only geeks and geniuses (e.g., Matt Damon in “Good
Will Hunting”) are good at math. The cool kids steer clear. It’s too hard. It’s
not cool. It’s the butt of jokes.
But as can be seen, math may be a qualifying requirement for
a well-paying middle class job. And as our information-based economy continues
to unfold, this will be increasingly true.
Long gone are the days when one can make a good wage based
on the sweat of one’s brow. Lifting 50 pound bags of flour is now relegated to
pallet jacks, with a single operator displacing dozens of Italian immigrant
mothers who had previously been paid to stack tons of goods. We hate
technology, but each of us with a smart phone is embracing it. The workplace has
changed.
But have our cultural and educational systems changed apace?
Has mathematical literacy, numeracy, become increasingly desirable and culturally
acceptable? Alas, it has not.
It is shockingly apparent that we have not prepared our kids
for the new workplace. They believe math is hard, uncool, geeky, and hence,
avoid it. But if the alternative is a minimum wage job as a barista, are we serving
them well?
A plethora of studies have shown that high school math
skills are correlated to higher earnings later in life. And not just earnings,
math ability also eases our way through the increasingly complex thicket of
everyday life. A 2013 study done by researchers at Princeton University found
that in the financial meltdown of 2008, poor basic math skills correlated strongly
with mortgage defaults. Controlling for all other factors (age, ethnicity, education,
household income), the researchers studied hundreds of subprime mortgages across
New England. Their findings were surprising in that it wasn’t specifically the
choice of mortgage contract that led to default, but rather other life
behaviors indicating poor overall financial decision making.
How to motivate kids to learn math and teach them more effectively?
One whimsical thought is that if only the media, Hollywood,
and sports idols could embrace this cause, things might be different. We have shifted
culturally against smoking tobacco and in favor of gay rights, why not a
campaign to make math acceptable? It’s too easy to laugh at math geeks, as
witnessed by “The Big Bang Theory” whose innumerate character played by Kaley Cuoco wins
our affection.
A more serious route being debated by educators is to teach
math in context. For instance, high schoolers should be taught basic financial
skills and, in the process, exponents and logarithms. That is how interest calculations
and amortization tables are made, why not learn how in context and not as part
of an abstract course in algebra? This could be amplified by having chemistry and
biology teachers, for instance, explaining the math required to understand their
subject matters.
After all, math was not invented as an abstract topic. Fractions
were an outgrowth of commerce, where early merchants needed to portion out
fractional bushels of grain or wheels of cheese. Multiplying 2/3 times 4 was a
practical exercise, not something dreamed up to torture a fourth grader. Likewise, geometry and trigonometry were
developed from the building trades and nautical navigation, not as an abstract
brain teaser for high schoolers.
This won’t be solved anytime soon, but we must make numeracy
a top goal. Those well-paying jobs at Electric Boat are awaiting.
