I listened to the NPR story “For Manufacturing Jobs, Workers Brush Up On Math”, in which the thesis of the reporter is that a lot of people are not getting jobs because they don’t have the basic arithmetic skills necessary to input the correct parameters to complex manufacturing machinery. The costs associated with inputting the wrong numbers to these machines are extremely large (~$1K to $10K), relative to the salary of the workers. As a result, manufacturing math courses are popping up at community colleges and training centers. The thing that’s odd about this story is that we begin learning these things in middle school, and the recursive nature of math education means that they’re going to see them in almost every math course from then on. Is it just that students forget these skills after they leave the high school environment? Or do they ever learn it? And if they’re not learning it, how are they graduating from high school? Is it possible to pass high school level math courses without knowing basic arithmetic?
Sean M. R. Crowell 