2 + 2 = Who cares?

It is February of 1945, and I am lost in Texas. Well, not in Texas, but rather over Texas. Eight of us Navy aviation cadets flying North American SNJs are milling around hopelessly in the middle of nowhere like rats in a maze. Ashen-faced and numb with dread, we’ve come to the realization that all of Texas looks pretty much the same from 6,000 feet. Somewhere down there is NAS Corpus Christi; and we -- the hottest of the hot, the smartest of the smart -- haven’t a clue as to where. With the whole country depending on us to win a war, we can’t even find our home base, let alone Tokyo.

At this point in our flying careers, we have become proficient in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and celestial navigation and can intelligently discuss the merits of domestic beer over imported. We are equipped with the knowledge of True North vs. Magnetic North and can manipulate the latest in navigational aids: the E6B plotter with its factors of wind direction and velocity, air speed, and altitude. And still we are lost.

Fast forward 56 years and plunk a 10-year-old kid down in that same middle-of-nowhere. This kid, who wears his hat backwards and thinks Adam Sandler is a hoot, can tell you within 6 feet exactly where he is. Why? Because he has in his grubby little hands a Global Positioning System device. Anybody can buy one; if I am ever unfortunate enough to be lost in Texas again, I will buy one and the only mathematics involved will be checking to see if my VISA is maxed out.

In my opinion, mathematics has never in the history of the world been less important to learn. We have calculators, computers, ATMs, and CPAs to take care of this. Yet this flies directly in the face of educators who are adamant in their insistence that every child know how to determine the area of a trapezoid and learn to call everything he doesn’t know "X." In the dark recesses of our adult minds are the words logarithm, cosine, quadratic equations, and square roots. For about 15 minutes back in high school, we had a grip on this stuff and knew that πr² was so important we could never look at a circle again without reveling in the fact that we knew the secret to its area -- a secret that will go with me to my grave as far as I’m concerned.

When I braced my high school counselor with the announcement that I was going to seek fame and fortune in the field of dentistry, she said, "Then you must take integral and differential calculus." I said, "Why?" I considered "because" an inadequate response, signing up for a course in co-ed badminton instead.

The point is, everyone from the president on down (or up depending on your proclivities) declares our youngsters to be deficient in math skills. Perhaps they are. Lord knows they are deficient in a number of other areas, but that is what the teen years are all about, and the hope is that they will outgrow it, whatever "it" is.

Let us try to keep a positive spin on this. Although the dumbing down of America has been going on now for years, the present generation does excel at many things, notably skateboard tricks, finding new places to pierce and wailing away at whiny pop songs. But except for a handful of students who will go ahead to develop the technology for the rest of us, the vast majority needs only to master the multiplication tables, or better yet, learn to replace the batteries in their calculators when necessary.

One hundred thousand or so dentists have fruitlessly tried to put the sentence "The square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides" out of their minds. Not once during a 40-year practice has this ever come up, either in a clinical or social setting. Pythagoras was not a dentist. He wouldn’t know an onlay from a lingual torus, yet every dentist had to have the Pythagorean Theory drilled into him like it was the Final Answer.

Once you’ve learned that lending a person $10 for one week is not the same as lending him $1 for 10 weeks, you’ve pretty much got the problem of mathematics licked. For everything else, there is "X."