chickenfeet

Oh, I occasionally claim to be illiterate when someone wants me to read something but it looks boring. I think I am actually illiterate when it comes to boring things. That's probably generally what people mean when they say they're innumerate too.

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I'm not so sure. You can read and write at a level appropriate to a university graduate. There are plenty of people in 'responsible' positions with less ability to interpret and present numerical data than a reasonably intelligent 11 year old. And they are quite proud of the fact!

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When I was 11 I was far far better at mental calculation than now. In fact probably more numerically competent in general. It's all about using it or losing it, isn't it? I thought I loved school maths at 11. A couple of years later it suddenly became incredibly tedious.

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marnameow.livejournal.com

In the context of a review, I think knowing that the reviewer is not so good with numbers is essential information. I didn't read that extract as saying 'Ooh, look at me, I cannot do numbers, am I not great?'. Rather, it's saying 'I suck at numbers, adn still I enjoued this book lots.'

It would be hard to admit to illiteracy in a newspaper review. The very nature of the medium means that you *are* good with words. But some people *don't* understand numbers.

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But some people *don't* understand numbers.

That's the bit I don't get/accept. If by age 16 somebody despite hundreds of hours schooling couldn't read and write, they would be in remedial ed and probably destined for, at best, a dead end job. Someone who is still innumerate at that stage is considered OK and probably can even get a university place. Interestingly enough, in Germany, where a relatively high standard of mathematical attainment is required for university entrance, they don't seem to have the same problem.

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marnameow.livejournal.com

A lot of it depends on what you are studing, though. Both times I applied for university, I just needed to have *passed* maths. (Irish school system, where you do math until you leave school). A 'D' at the lowest level would have gotten me in, both times. I was studying first art, and then eng lit. Clever maths is not needed for those.

But if I'd wanted to do comp sci, or maths, or physics, then I would have needed to get a good mark in maths, and my english and art scores would not have mattered so much.

People don't understand all sorts of things. And studying will only get you so far. For a lot of jobs you don't need any more than basic maths skills. And Margaret Drabble is an author, so I'd imagine that they're not at all needed for what she does - writing novels.

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I'm not suggesting that it is necessary for everyone to have a high level of mathematical knowledge. The Irish position sounds about right. It certainly implies a level well beyond "innumeracy". I still find it odd that someone would proclaim themselves "innumerate". I have yet to hear a physicist declare him/herself "illiterate".

People don't understand all sorts of things. And studying will only get you so far

But a great deal further than most people will allow. 100 years ago, any reasonably well educated person would be expected to have roughly 'A' level or better knowledge of both Latin and Greek, even if they were contemplating a scientific career. It was expected, so it was achieved.

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Well, it's obviously a misuse of the word innumerate, accompanied by the rather common complaint of maths phobia.

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I agree. I think it unlikely that Ms Drabble is truly innumerate. Its the underlying assumption that if she were it would be no big deal that I find annoying.

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You do know that girls get taught they can't do maths, don't you? Most boys (but not all) don't like maths girls, so one learns pretty quick you have to choose between the boys and the maths. This is a very sweeping generalisation of course.

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I believe that there is research that shows that girls at single sex schools tend to do better at maths and science which would tend to support your point.

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marnameow.livejournal.com

From what I remember, the lowest math level in the Irish system is long division and basic algebra. I do remember looking at exam papers and being astounded at the simplicity - for the most part it contained things that had been covered in primary school.

I do think that there are things that some people just don't pick up. I had to study french for five years at school, and I left being unable to string a sentence together properly. I passed exams (barely), but because I applied a lot of logic to it, not because I could actually do the question on the paper. Now, I *did* try to learn the language, and just couldn't. My knowledge of Irish is not much better, and that's after thirteen years of study. So I'll admit that I can't do languages, and if I were reviewing a book on soemthing related, I think I'd let people know this.

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I think lots of people do themselves down a bit when it comes to numeracy. Most people can do basic calulations okay. Do you think everyone should be able to manage calculus equations and all?

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I think lots of people do themselves down a bit when it comes to numeracy

Absolutely! The odd thing is that it is socially acceptable to do so.

Do you think everyone should be able to manage calculus equations and all?

I have thought about that a lot. I think the answer is yes I think a reasonably intelligent person can reach 'A' level standard or better in any subject if they put their mind to it. In mathematics, specifically. I think the crunch point comes when a degree of abstraction and rigour is introduced. 'A' level doesn't require more than the ability to manipulate concrete algebraic expressions in fairly predictable ways. The point where even some quite bright people lose it is when they have to deal with formal proofs and abstractions like Groups and Vector Spaces. There is a world of difference between manipulating expressions involving specific vectors and operators in a specific vector space and proving a general theorem true for all vector spaces.

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The strange thing is, the time they're trying hardest to fill you with the most abstract bits is exactly the time when your attention is mostly likely to be entirely taken up with booze and boys and marijuana. Or other stuff like that.

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Yes, though experience would suggest that it is a subject for the young. Most mathematicians seem to do their best work before they hit 30.

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lemur-catta.livejournal.com

I think here's where you hit on something like an answer. I think plenty of people who had the standard math skill required for university entrance and no further math instruction thereafter (an only minimal use for what they learned beyond arithmetic) find that the skills deteriorate in the extreme after a few years.I don't think they experience a similar deterioration of reading skills even if the read infrequently. It's true that their vocabulary actually decreases gradually but not to anything like the degree.

It may have something to do with the kind of memory involved and a certain plasticity of abstract thought that degenerates after 30 making relearning math skills much more difficult than rebulilding vocabulary. If mathematicians tend to do their best work before thirty and so many students with interest and ability in math hit an impasse and just cant advance beyond a certain level, perhaps that barrier is hit a lot sooner by people with modest ability and no interest at all. You rarely hear of writers doing their best work before thirty (unless they didn't live long).

There's little incentive in ordinary life to keep up the math skills learned in school. Even in university people tend to let them go and then try to brush them up adequately for graduate school entrance (where the math portion is tellingly less demanding than undergrad entrance exams). Only the rare enthusiast finds ways to keep using it (they probably tend to go into the sciences anyway).There just aren't a lot of math hobbyists out there.

I think (and I think you know) the writer's comment about innumeracy was just self-deprecating humour , perhaps designed to lure a few readers who might otherwise be scared off the book.

Why is it more acceptable to make fun of your meager math skills than your small vocabulary? Because the deterioration of those skills is so much more widespread, and there is that sudden marked deterioration that's somewhat embarrassing but rarely enough so that you'd give up your free time trying to learn or relearn calculus just in case you come across a book on a mathematical topic that isn't a dead boring read.

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I think (and I think you know) the writer's comment about innumeracy was just self-deprecating humour , perhaps designed to lure a few readers who might otherwise be scared off the book.

And maybe to pick up boys.

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I think there's also that thing that if one does know anything about the history of mathematics and the Great Discoveries, these are always (as I recollect) represented as something achieved at a very young age by supernaturally, or at least highly unusually, gifted (male) people. That maths is seen as a field in which commitment and slogging avail much less than many others. I was reading something somewhere recently about female mathematicians which suggests this is actually not so - female mathematicians tending not to be the idiot-savant type of child/adolescent prodigy of this dominant paradigm, and making discoveries at the advanced age of 30+, apparently. Might have been New Scientist?

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The young thing is interesting. Its not that older mathematicians don't do useful research. They do, but its rarely the breakthrough stuff. The breakthrough stuff isn't done by child adolescent prodigies either though; its more often PhD thesis or post doc type stuff. Dirac's work on the electron would be a well known example. Of course, there isn't much breakthrough stuff so generalisations in this area are risky! Pretty hard to generalise about women mathematicians too as they are still unfortunately rather scarce.

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Valid points in many ways but the 'deteriorating skills' hypothesis doesn't explain why it is perfectly OK for an eighteen year old entering a good university to more or less proudly proclaim his, or more often her, complete incompetence in all areas mathematical.

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lemur-catta.livejournal.com

Well , unless Ms Drabble is 18 and about to enter university you're now getting onto the topic of anti-intellectualism at universities, popular stereotypes of people in the sciences, and why young women use more self-deprecating language or strangle their own intellectual growth. I don't have much new to say there.

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buzzy-bee.livejournal.com

I suspect as well that whereas literacy is something which is constantly exercised to some extent, even if it is just reading the paper and writing a few e-mails, numeracy tends to be used far less often. So most people can still do basic addition, subtraction and multiplication, but more advanced concepts are not used in day to day life and one forgets them.

Certainly I have forgotten almost all of the advanced maths I knew when I passed "A" level maths apart from some low level statistical stuff I use in my job.

It is common enough to find pensioners, former unskilled manual workers usually, who are functionally illiterate (unable, for example, to fill in a benefit application form, or write a single page letter). Certainly I come across them fairly frequently through my work. Writing was simply not a skill that they used once they left school.

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I don't imagine you would describe yourself as "innumerate " though. I agree that typically one doesn't use much of one's mathematical knowledge post school/university but I am pretty sure it profoundly influences the way I look at how data are presented in a e.g. a newspaper.

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thidwick.livejournal.com

Right. I totally agree.

In my mind (and this is just a semantics thing, likely) there is a world of difference between arithmetic and mathematics. I can do arithmetic just fine. But mathematics (algebra, trigonometry, etc.) I am not great at. I could do it but not without a lot of effort. I made it up through pre-calculus but by that point found it difficult and not-fun enough where I decided not to move on to calculus. Given my chosen career, I've not regretted it.

I did get decent marks in math. But now, ten years after my last time actively studying it, I find that I cannot solve even a very simple algebraic equation. Math, to me, is very much like a foreign language -- use it or lose it.

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Whereas people who are basically capable of reading and writing don't, I think, label themselves 'illiterate' even if they never open a book, get their news via TV and radio rather than newspapers, etc (and thus have a great part of the realms opened by literacy unavailable to them), people who are literate and capable of doing basic calculations, balancing their chequebooks and the other simple necessities of life involving numbers, know that there are whole realms of mathematics which are more or less closed to them. While I perhaps wouldn't describe myself as totally innumerate, I don't do even fairly simple mathematical puzzles for pleasure, and the higher realms are opaque to me. To call this state of affairs 'innumeracy' may be a rather Heepish degree of humility, but no more so, surely, than saying that one is tone-deaf or can only appreciate music to a limited extent?

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bopeepsheep.livejournal.com

I doubt it applies to Margaret Drabble but, as well as all the good points raised in other comments, I would venture that there genuinely are innumerate people out there. Work in a shop and you meet a fair few of them. (Linger round the cash desk in the equivalent of your local Co-op and you'll see them in the wild.)

People who offer you a handful of coins when you ask them for 74p, and ask you to take them - not because their hands are otherwise engaged but because they genuinely have no idea how to make 74p out of the coins on offer.
People who don't understand why you're offering them one pound and fourteen pence in change along with your ten pound note, paying for something that costs 5.64.
People who buy five things costing 3.99 each and don't understand why it doesn't come to 15.00 and complain loudly about it.

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I would venture that there genuinely are innumerate people out there.

I don't doubt it. It would worry me if they were university students or Guardian columnists.

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bopeepsheep.livejournal.com

But innumerate university lecturers - that is all too plausible. Consider the kind of don who lives in college (or college-provided accommodation) and has his rent deducted from salary at source or pays it by direct debit. He eats in college, reads the newspaper online or in the SCR, gets sent books to review and buys the rest with a credit card which is settled automagically by direct debit each month, and never needs to part with cash. After a few years he becomes the kind of person who bumbles over 74p. And that is a supposedly intelligent person.

I can name you at least four of those (but I won't).

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I assume that the anecdote about Einstein habitually getting muddled over the correct change and ticket prices on Vienna trams is entirely apocryphal? It sounds much too ben trovato an 'absentminded scientist, lost in the clouds of higher mathematics and thus unable to deal with day to day trivia' story. After all, J M Keynes was a theoretical economist, but nonetheless able to use his understanding of economics to good practical purpose on behalf of the finances of Kings College Cambridge.

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I have known my fair share of academics, many of them mathematicians, and while they included a few eccentrics I don't think any of them were incapable of calculating the tip on a restaurant bill! It must be an Oxford thing. Something in the water?

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