As any parent driving their young family to any destination on the planet can testify, at some point on the journey, one of their youthful charges will ask the age-old question: “Are we nearly there yet?” Depending on the number of occasions the query has been raised, the response can vary from “Not yet, dear” to something with a tetchier edge to it.
Teachers in general, and maths teachers in particular, suffer an educational version of the same question: “When am I going to use this?” A similar array of responses is available to the teacher as to the parent. And sometimes, you must admit defeat and tell pupils the purpose of learning about leaf and stem diagrams is to gain marks in a GCSE qualification. In 30 years of working across a variety of industry sectors, a stem and leaf diagram has never appeared on my horizon.
However, most of the time I have found a meaningful answer to offer the questioner. Although my experience is fairly limited - I have only worked in media, information services, financial software, regulatory consulting and teaching - and there is a world of working options I haven’t directly experienced, I know maths is deeply embedded inside the career choices of my friends and strangers alike.
Anyone who is involved in healthcare should have an incredibly strong grasp of ratio. When dosages need calculating based on a patient’s weight, you have to hope the morphine drip has been subjected to more than a best guess. Medicine is the same as hairdressing in this regard: when someone is colouring your hair, they need a firm grip on ratios if you want a pale pink rather than an intense red when you leave the salon several hours later.
The interesting element to those first two examples is that we are talking about the deployment of pure maths skills in practical environments. The abstract algebra suddenly gets sticky and dirty as it helps patients to stay alive and customers to get highlights. When I cover simultaneous linear equations, some young whippersnapper rolls their eyes and points out that they’ll never use this after the end-of-year exam. Usually, I stop dead in my tracks and explain that I used them when I ran my own business and needed to estimate what price I could raise my prices to while still increasing revenue, despite the inevitable loss of customers.
Pupils engage with ‘real-world’ maths
If you spend your time telling pupils concrete examples of how you have used maths in your daily working life, then eyes stop rolling and their expressions are transformed into curious faces who want to hear about the world out there. Now I know I am lucky: I have a wealth of life experience to offer my pupils from before I joined the educational crowd.
Many teachers instead went straight from university into teacher training and then into primary or secondary schools. For them, examples can appear only indirectly, but they still exist and lessons can be couched in an acknowledgement that maths isn’t just for passing a GCSE. Not only is it for life, but it is for your working life, too. Numbers, analysis and statistics turn up in almost every career path that exists, and pupils deserve to know about this while at school.
Applied maths implies a real-world context by definition, but if you want to be a builder or a plumber, you’d better be able to understand measurements, scales, mechanics and ratio. Of course, if you want to make any money doing any job, your ability to work out percentage increases needs to be second to none. Typically with jobs delivering services to the home, customers get charged a call-out fee, followed by an hourly rate plus cost of materials. Now that’s what I call an algebraic expression.
And that’s before we get to focus on career paths like architecture, where analysis of forces becomes a job in itself.
When we think of statistics, our first port of call might be the marketing department and its market research function, where customer data is gathered and patterns are spotted to be sent to product management and sales. Both those departments use a variety of techniques to validate the claims before any action is committed to improve products and services.
But there are other places where statistics can live: in the bakery, have the cupcakes sold well this week and how many should we prepare to make next week? Similar resource planning takes place in the law firm when the partners sit down and decide how many associates will be needed next year and whether to raise billing rates for existing clients.
Maths is everywhere in the workplace and almost every piece of maths in key stage 3 to key stage 5 appears somewhere in at least one job somewhere in the country. From algebra to statistics, mechanics to ratio, maths topics go beyond the classroom and penetrate every corner of the workplace. Apart from stem and leaf, of course.
Graeme Austin teaches maths at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls in Hertfordshire
