Why Are So Many Americans Spectacularly Bad at Math?
'The first step in solving a problem is recognizing there is one' ‘Will McAvoy’ quoted this brilliant line in Aaron Sorkin's drama series “ The Newsroom . ” In the same episode, he went on explaining why America’s not the number one country in the world anymore. One thing that he didn’t mention in that argument was the poor knowledge of math not just in the United States, but practically in every school across the world. Sadly, that’s not a stereotype or over-generalization of the mathematical prowess of modern students; the statistics tend to be not in their favor. The numbers don’t lie! The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that only 33 percent of eighth-graders tested proficient in math. Americans perform worse in math than many of their international peers on the world stage. In 2012, US teens came in 27th place in math , below their counterparts in Vietnam (no offense) . That’s very unfortunate, given...
