Eva van Loon Cognition Therapist

The innumerate among us are innumerable now. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines an innumerate as “unacquainted with the basic principles of mathematics and science.”
When I was in primary school, there were few innumerates among us. I recall a sense of balance among school subjects, specifically of equal concentration on mathematics (which we called arithmetic) and language. There were, of course, a few luckless non-starter students, derisively called ree-tards, who displayed early signs of illiteracy and innumeracy and consequently did not escape school until too big for the biggest desks.

Then came New Math. The word arithmetic, formerly well understood as a synonym for ciphering–addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and a few extras like telling time and Roman numerals–disappeared. Bye bye, rote learning and chanting tables. Memorisation was bunk, apparently. It was all Mathematics now, each chapter of our texts prefaced by philosophical discourse that mystified the teachers and parents as much as the students. As a new teacher in the 70s, I remember thinking we’d perhaps thrown the baby out with the bath, as the saying goes.

New Math opened up a new field of academics, the what’s-wrong-with-our-kids-that-they-can’t-do-math? field. Sheila Tobias’ 1978 book, Overcoming Math Anxiety, made math incompetence a political issue, claiming it was not failure of intellect but a failure of nerve. In 1988 mathematician John Paulos gave the math disaster its correct name in Innumeracy; Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. He suggested innumeracy is a failure of critical thinking.

Innumerates, Tobias noticed, have no mathematical frame of reference and no basic understandings to build on. They’re afraid. The infamous word problems terrify them, and they’re convinced they’re dumb. Paulos admitted, “These feelings constitute a formidable block to numeracy” but, he insisted, “The truism that one learns how to read by reading…extends to solving mathematical problems.” He suggested techniques like explaining problems clearly, working backwards from solutions, drawing diagrams, and all the tricks good tutors use.

Tutoring hasn’t fixed innumeracy. And never will.

Today many students have little sense of how numbers relate, such as how 4 relates to 8, or that 10 underlies everything. There’s little automatic pattern recognition going on. Yet the math needed for daily life is not philosophy but simply pattern recognition.

For the innumerate, fractions are a jungle. Without automatic pattern recognition, per cent, decimals, and fractions look nothing alike. It all ceases to make sense. There’s no subconscious foundation on which to build what is now facetiously called pre-algebra.
How to fix? There’s one way: multisensorial drill fitted to the individual brain to create rhythm and pattern in the subconscious. Then push one arithmetic pattern at a time down into it.
Don’t try to fix innumeracy at home without training or a cognition therapist. If you have toddlers, however, turn off the TV and engage them in all kinds of rhythm and pattern training instead. The benefits in math class will be, well, incalculable.