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Re: math problem/freeways (fwd)



It is, perhaps, discouraging to recognize that the op ed piece by
Albert Bartlett will make no impression on Joe Sixpack. It will not
reach what I will guess is a large majority of the Denver population
because it is intended for a newspaper rather than television. It is
logically presented, a mode which is largely unrecognized by the
majority of newspaper readers. Following the logical development
requires the reader to be numerate, and I'm sorry to have to report
(as a university professor with many colleagues in the arts and
humanities) that the majority of those capable of parsing logic
cannot (or will not) take the trouble to understand even simple
arithmetic. They are mathematics averse!

One of my colleagues, a quite numerically competent philosopher,
related a story to me about one of his lectures. The philosopher had
just made a comparison of the U.S. and Chinese economies in which
the important point was that a much larger fraction of the Chinese
workforce is employed in feeding the population. A student (who is
himself Chinese) protested that of course the fraction was larger;
the Chinese population is much larger than the U.S. population! My
colleague was left wondering how many in the audience sympathized
with the offended student.

From Joe Sixpack's point of view Bartlett's article is written in a
foreign language and then encrypted. It will have about the same
impact as if it had come over the radio in French - in International
Morse Code! (How do they do those diacriticals, eh?)

Of course the only way to remedy this deplorable situation is
through education. Jane Jackson's implicit point is certainly
correct; our students should be able to read and understand a simple
argument presented by a fine scholar like Al Bartlett. Our first
goal as teachers must be to get our students to *want* to understand
such things.

How do we do that?

Leigh