11 March

Many people hate maths, or say they can’t do it. I think this is because maths is so badly taught, and that bad teaching comes from a misunderstanding of what mathematics is. Maths is the study of patterns. Where it got lost was in moving the patterns to the written page or screen, and thinking that’s where it lives. That’s great for people who are good at manipulating symbols on flat pages or screens, and a disaster for the people who aren’t good at that. Jean Lave is an anthropologist who set out to test these ideas. She used grocery shoppers as her testers. What she found was that people who were hopeless at ‘maths’, in the way we learn it at school or university, were often absolutely superb at doing even complex calculations in a shopping context. There they were able to understand the patterns without any problem at all. But the minute she transcribed these same grocery calculations into a more standard textbook type maths problem, they had no idea what they were doing.