NPR and poor math skills
I was REALLY disappointed when I heard the 'letters' section of All Things Considered on NPR yesterday. Apparently last week they did a piece on the recent article showing (big surprise) that girls can do math as well as boys. In that piece, they mentioned a math problem that had 2 answers.
In this week's 'letters' they said they had lots of listeners writing in to find out what the two answers were. So it turns out the problem they mentioned was:
(x^2) - 15 = 0
seriously. SERIOUSLY. So they said the two answers were 'the square root of 15 and the negative square root of 15' and then giggled while they asked each other if they could have solved the problem, and one host said 'i would have been more confident if it was the square root of 16'.
SERIOUSLY. This is basic high school algebra. I don't expect people to be able to do calculus, but I do expect anyone with a high school education to know that when you multiple two negative numbers you get a positive number. Is that really NOT part of high school math standards? And for anyone who's interested, the square root of 15 is +/- 3.872983346207417
In this week's 'letters' they said they had lots of listeners writing in to find out what the two answers were. So it turns out the problem they mentioned was:
(x^2) - 15 = 0
seriously. SERIOUSLY. So they said the two answers were 'the square root of 15 and the negative square root of 15' and then giggled while they asked each other if they could have solved the problem, and one host said 'i would have been more confident if it was the square root of 16'.
SERIOUSLY. This is basic high school algebra. I don't expect people to be able to do calculus, but I do expect anyone with a high school education to know that when you multiple two negative numbers you get a positive number. Is that really NOT part of high school math standards? And for anyone who's interested, the square root of 15 is +/- 3.872983346207417