I’ve been helping my sister with her calculus a bit lately. It has me wondering about something. We live in a society where almost every high school graduate has a solid understanding of algebra and almost every baby boomer who doesn’t work in a math intensive field has trouble with basic algebra. At the same time, we’re expected to remember every single language we were ever taught and when we don’t, it’s apparently a flaw in ourselves for not maintaining that level of understanding. Fact of life, people forget things. Things that seem most likely to be forgotten tend to be infrequently used and taught in a disciplinarian style where the end individual has little interest in the subject.
Thus far, the average person I’ve met isn’t able to calculate how much their pay cheque changes by if they were to work an hour of overtime. For me, that happens to be $15.7, give or take about a quarter. Math and finances are two things that interest me, so I happen to know this stuff. I know little to nothing about things I happen to have little to no interest in, like pop culture or languages that I don’t speak every day.
