Tuesday 15 January 2013

Figure It Out

So there I was, queuing at the checkout in Waitrose. Ahead of me was one woman, who had bought four bottles of Peroni marked down to 69p (wish I'd spotted those) and one can of something fizzy cut to 29p. When she presented these at the till, everything seemed to go into slow motion (as so often happens, I find, when I'm next in the queue). The woman behind the till froze in an attitude of bewilderment and mild panic when confronted with these manually labelled items. Apparently they could not be processed in the usual way - someone would have to add up the price in their head. Clearly it was not going to be the woman at the till - she wasn't even going to try. She left her post, returning shortly with a young man who had a headset mike and a managerial air. Confidently he totted up the items - four at 69p, one at 29p - £4.03, sorted. At this point, the woman who was attempting to buy them pointed out politely that he was wrong. He took a run at it and tried again, coming up with a figure closer to the right total, but still out. The purchaser at this point gave him the correct figure and he rang it up without demur.
Can it really be that we live in a world where people below a certain age - even those who work in jobs where it might be decidedly useful - have no mental arithmetic? Has the 'education' system combined with our ever growing dependence on technology to deprive much of the population of what is surely still an important life skill? I hope not...

4 comments:

  1. The short answer, Nige, is yes, and it's not a recent thing. I interviewed many schooleavers from the late sixies onwards, from the late seventies there was a marked lack of even the most basic of knowledge, simple stuff such as..express 3/4 as a decimal figure, silence, "express?", "ok, convert", louder silence, what went wrong?










    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm tempted to answer Comprehensive Education - but I guess it's also the rise of calculator technology. What's worrying is that numbers and quantities must have no intrinsic meaning to those not in the habit of dealing with them mentally. Maybe this widespread innumeracy played a part in the great credit crunch...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes we have is the answer and the only thing standing in the way of a total loss of mental arithmatic ability is the noble game of darts.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It's maybe just to do with not doing maths in a while. A few years out of school and not doing any maths (and relying on machines) and you could become quite rusty.

    ReplyDelete