In one of my early jobs after MBA, I worked in the Marketing department of a large corporation. Once a week, a group of us met to discuss how the prior week’s sales promotion performed and how to tweak them for the future. We talked about sales lift, break even, 15% or 20% discount? Do we add an extra early bird discount? Will their expected Lifetime Value of the customer make up for the cost to acquire the customer? Math is a language. I notice many people didn’t speak it. They might as well have been foreigners who found themselves in a foreign country where mathematical terms and mental gyrations seemed like Greek to them.
Research says that when your child grows up, if she doesn’t speak this language, she would have closed off 2/3rds of all the careers out there.
Okay, Math is not a language like French or Spanish or Chinese. It doesn’t attempt to express love, fear, memory or longing. Mathematics can describe snow, music or wild bears in highly precise quantitative terms, but it cannot communicate needs, desires or any emotions around them. It’s not designed to do those things.
Math is a language in the sense that it is used to communicate many, many things in everyday life. Some examples:
- Managing time: Every member of the team needs to be clear how the project is tracking to deliver it on time.
- Budgeting: Managing money, understanding discounts, and buying for the best price. How big a house can we afford?
- Sports: What’s the score? How much time left? What’s the probability of coming back?
- Cooking: Do we have enough chocolate chips to double the recipe? Restaurants – how many pounds of tomatoes to get us through the weekend?
- Exercising and Dieting
- Driving: How long before the kids get antsy?
- Home Projects – painting, stitching, renovations, space planning, etc.
Math is also the common medium of communication for many other subjects.
Whether or not Math technically qualifies as a language, what’s clear and undebatable is this: your kids need to be great at speaking it.
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