The new regime of home-schooling has suddenly brought home to many parents a problem that educators have for years been complaining about. Australia trails the developed world in literacy and numeracy and of the two, numeracy is the hardest to bluff your way, especially if you are presuming to instruct kids who are always such hard markers.
I must confide here that while I get by with words, I trip up on numbers and fall, oh so easily, into the abysmal pit of Australia’s numeracy failure.
I know innumeracy in too many ways to count.
Struggling with the weird arithmetic of parking meters and internet banking, I take little comfort from observing that I am by no means alone.
Nor it seems will things improve for the next generation of kids. The report of the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that in mathematics Australian 15-year-olds were three years behind their equivalents in Singapore.
As with illiteracy, I am assuming the number of our people who are innumerate might be, well, innumerable. In numbers beyond counting they carry their dark secret just as I have. Until now.
I am a complete stranger to algebra. I can barely spell trigonometry. Calculus is something I see the dentist about. A square root is conventional sex. And fractions make me fractious.
Somehow, I muddle through life without any of them. I manage to fill a swimming pool without ever having to let ‘x’ equal the volume of water. I turn on the tap until it’s full. It’s that easy.
And as for treating the water, no need for volumes, proportions or a formula; I just keep adding the chemicals until the water turns blue.
And if the children’s skin changes colour, then I just add more water.
As I said an uncalculating life is that easy.
And yet and yet … there is a niggling concern that perhaps I have missed out on something. I often feel sorry for people who somehow avoided the great works of English Literature. I know they are not unhappy about it, but surely only because they don’t know what they are missing out on. And so it might be for me: the unknown world of numbers surely contains delights, magic, marvels and meaning, all of which I am totally ignorant.
Because of the way I am wired I need a book. I need words to explain numbers. And that’s where Hobart author and mathematics teacher Helen Prochazka comes belatedly to my rescue with a book simply titled “The Mathematics Book”. It’s a big, glossy, beautifully illustrated publication about the history and the meaning of numbers.
My eyes have been opened to a whole new world. Albeit a scary one.
In the early pages I learned about the extraordinary life of Fibonacci numbers and their bizarre replication in the whole of nature and in the universe.
How come nobody taught me this stuff a lot earlier?
As a lifelong atheist and math-hater, I find it a bit unsettling that there might actually be a mathematician in the cockpit.
I don’t have space to explain here but Prochazka makes it interesting and as she says, the pictures make it easier.
“I have made it non-threatening. People can get unnecessarily frightened by numbers until they understand them and conquer their fear.” Helen assured me that the subject was by no means beyond anyone’s limited intellect. “The book is set at roughly the year 8 level, but I wrote it for people who somehow fell through the net and can do no more than add, subtract and divide but who would like to understand more.
And now, in the present Caronavirus crisis, it might help parents make a better fist of homeschooling the kids.”
Prochazka explained it wasn’t just missionary work among the numberless heathens that inspired the book. “It was for the many professionals who have to teach mathematics at high school level but weren’t taught properly. I felt sorry for them and wanted to help.”
She refers to those so called ‘out-of-field’ teachers, often PE instructors, who in the absence of trained math teachers, are tasked with a subject beyond their training. “There’s a very limited number of properly trained math graduates coming out every year and the schools have to compete for them.
Helen Prozchazka, says most of her customers are not mere lost souls but are actually, “Struggling mathematics teachers instructing way beyond their capacity.”
“The Mathematics Book” first came out in Prochazka’s home town of Hobart two years ago and was keenly received. Fullers Book shop in the CBD sold an initial 500 copies making it a Hobart best seller for three months.
“Those were bloody good numbers for a mathematics book,” Helen Prochazka laughs. “For three months not even Helen Garner, Bill Bryson and Richard Flanagan couldn’t knock us off the shelf.”
Now it looks like this book’s hour might have come round again.
The Mathematics Book
Helen Prochazka
Zenolith
Hobart 2017.
charles-wooley.com 