Can understanding math save a life?

Editor's note: Shulman is a student columnist at Kennedy High School, which takes in students from Bellmore and Merrick.

In elementary school, students learn the four basic operations of math. In high school, however, students are taught in a way that allows them to forget these operations. In most math classes (beside parts of Honors Pre-Calculus and Advanced Placement Calculus), students are allowed to use calculators.

Calculator use is justifiable at times, but its use can become addictive, particularly when students are rarely encouraged to do simple mathematics on their own. This has caused a giant problem: Many high school students cannot do simple math without a calculator.

It has nothing to do with understanding or intelligence; in fact, it is an irony of high school mathematics classes: Students are learning advanced math without knowing the basics.

This results from most math classes being taught in this manner: “Here is a mathematical concept. Now here are the buttons that you press on the calculator to get the answer.” The same students who were able to do the calculations in sixth grade can no longer do them, despite being in high school.

Ask students to use pencil and paper to multiply 326.2 by 12.2. Then have them divide 242.88 by .32. If you have a child who’s almost done with elementary school and a child who’s almost done with high school, I would predict that, without a calculator, the elementary school student would be more likely to get the problems correct. When students are taught tricks to get a calculator to give them an answer, they forget how to do math, and class turns into memorization of calculator tricks instead of understanding of math.

So, why should students care about basic math if they can just use a calculator? What if your cash register breaks, or you mistype a number into the calculator and don’t realize the answer cannot possibly be right? The son of one of my teachers was once in the hospital, and he needed to receive a shot of morphine. The nurse performed a calculation and set the amount of morphine to her answer. The dosage that the nurse entered was a hundred times the dose that the child was supposed to receive and could have been lethal. My teacher noticed the mistake and immediately alerted the doctor and asked him to check the calculation.

If only the nurse had understood how decimal places worked when multiplying and dividing. In the division problem above, would your child have known that if you divide a one number by another number between 0 and 1, your answer is a number larger than the number you started with? Would your child recognize that the nurse’s answer didn’t make sense?