It Adds Up: Improve Basic Math Instruction

Wisconsin State Journal
October 12, 2003

Better brush up on your Venn diagramming: In suburban Sun Prairie, calculus is cool and algebra's awesome.

Prairie View Middle School students have conquered math anxiety and are flocking to their new math club.

That's great news. Kids today, more than ever before, need to know their numbers in order to succeed in a high-tech economy. But first, they need to know math isn't for nerds.

Math doesn't get the respect it deserves in education. Many schools are stuck with teachers who lack adequate math knowledge themselves, and as a result, tend to do a poor job of preparing today's students for a lifelong numbers game. Other well-off nations' students do much better in math than our kids.

So for one (that's a prime number), universities must graduate more math teachers. Half of all current math teachers lack a major or a minor in the subject.

But to reach that goal, the universities first need interested students. That's where the Sun Prairie club and other similar efforts will prove valuable. They're turning things around (that would be 180 degrees) at Prairie View Middle School by launching a math club with money from a $23,000 grant from the Actuarial Foundation based in Illinois. And 10 actuaries from General Casualty Cos., an insurance provider based in Sun Prairie, volunteer as math mentors and help teach some classes. (If you don't know what an actuary is, you're proving our point.)

The twice-weekly club meetings draw as many as 40 students (by the way, 40 shares the least common multiples 2 and 5 with all numbers ending in zero). The school uses the money to take math club members on field trips. Math, they are learning, is everywhere, even in cornfields. A recent field trip took students to a corn maze, where they learned map orienteering. Spread the word: Math is a survival skill. (If nine people read this editorial and each tells nine friends about it, and each of them tells nine more, how many people will get that word?)

The club applies math in more obvious ways, too, through budgeting, games, shopping and more. We're not going to get into the debate over what method of teaching math works best, at least today (that would be 24 hours). But the move to put math into the minds of more young people through clubs and fun activities clearly represents a modest but necessary step toward reducing the math ignorance that companies currently find in too many U.S. graduates.

In any case, math club must be a quantifiably good idea if the actuaries believe in it. After all, they evaluate the likelihood of future events and design ways to reduce the likelihood of undesirable events. Using math, of course.

So will plastic pocket protectors be the hot new teen fashion item next year? Don't ask us. Check your actuarial tables.

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It Adds Up: Improve Basic Math Instruction