{"id":5980,"date":"2012-01-06T09:35:34","date_gmt":"2012-01-06T09:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2012\/01\/06\/shameless-innumeracy\/"},"modified":"2012-01-06T09:35:34","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T09:35:34","slug":"shameless-innumeracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2012\/01\/06\/shameless-innumeracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Shameless Innumeracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

On last month’s post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update<\/a>, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post<\/cite> blog<\/a> that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes:<\/p>\n

\n

In fact, there were a lot of readers who responded to the posts saying exactly what Roach suggested: He’s been out of school too long. Others questioned why a successful businessman couldn’t pass 10th-grade math. (I looked at FCAT 10th-grade questions and couldn’t do them myself, but math has always been a crucible for me.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve been thinking about the general question of societal attitudes toward math and science again, for unrelated reasons, and this continues to be a *headdesk*<\/i> moment for me. If you want to know why we’re stuck with an utter clown show of economic policy<\/a>, a good place to start would be the fact that a person who is paid to write about education issues by one of the nation’s pre-eminent newspapers can breezily shrug off her inability to do tenth-grade math problems.<\/p>\n

As I said before, in a sane world, a public intellectual (even a low-level one like a newspaper writer) would be as ashamed to admit to innumeracy as to illiteracy. In this world, well, we can’t seriously expect an education writer to know math, can we? I mean, math is, like, hard<\/em>, y’know?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On last month’s post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes: In fact, there were… Continue reading Shameless Innumeracy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,9,28,81,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-math","category-politics","category-economics_1","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}