Otoh, last year, based on state testing, a third of Baltimore City high schools had zero students listed as proficient in math. I can't believe that 100% of the kids attending those schools are dummies. So there has to be some screwup at the level of the school that contributes to this.
My friends consider me a math whiz. I never thought I was until I got roped into administering pre-hire aptitude tests for a company I was working for about 18 years ago. The exam only tested for basic arithmetic and
very basic algebra and geometry because those were the only math skills the job required. Those subjects would correspond to Freshman and Sophomore high school math in New York.
The passing grade was 65 percent. More than 80 percent of applicants failed.
I never got less than an "A" in a math course in high school in college, but I never thought I was any kind of a whiz. In retrospect, I think the reason I found math easy was that I went to a technical high school wherein it would have been impossible to pass the shop courses without a sound grasp of math. Sheet metal shop, machine shop, electrical / electronics shop, hydraulics shop, and so forth all required what in retrospect was fairly advanced math.
Also in retrospect, I think the fact that we were applying the math to actual work made it easier to grasp. The math of calculating sheet metal bend allowances, for example, makes a lot more sense when you're actually bending sheet metal. The math of calculating resistances in a circuit makes more sense when you can measure the results with a multimeter. The math of sine waves makes more sense when you can manipulate them and see the results on an oscilloscope. Etcetera.
A lot of people also think I'm a mechanical whiz. I think that's probably more true than my being a math whiz, but the standards people use in bestowing that honor are ridiculously low. When I mention to some people (mainly younger ones) that I do my own oil changes, they think I'm a mechanical genius. When I mentioned that I changed the motor mounts on an old Saturn with nothing except a scissor jack, a piece of 2x4, and some wrenches to my teen-aged niece, she thought I was a mechanical god.
To me, that's silly. I was overhauling engines when I was 14 or 15. Changing motor mounts in a Saturn is a yawner. But young people today, unless they go to vocational high schools, don't have that experience.
Now if you want to talk to a math whiz, that would be my dad, who dropped out of high school and joined the Army as soon as he was old enough. But when he got out, he became a carpenter, and that's when he became a math whiz. Bad things happen when carpenters don't know their math. Eventually dad earned a GED and a college degree. Like me, he never got less than an "A" on a math course; and like me, he attributes that to having had to actually
use math all his life, not just learn it to put a course behind him.
I'd hazard a guess that if you tested the graduates of decent vocational high schools against graduates of "academic" high schools, the vocational school kids would come out ahead in math -- assuming that the tests were result-oriented rather than process-oriented. I took math through Calculus with straight A's, but I doubt I could pass an elementary school Common-Core math competency exam. I'd get all the results right, but I'd fail on the process parts. It's all bass-ackwards and convoluted, as far as I can tell. But I'd get the results right, and I'd do it without a calculator.
Rich
