Yeah, that was kind of unclear in the article – on the one hand they kept going on and on about “mental math”…and on the other hand, they did give an example of having to write things down for a customer.

If they could do the math by hand, it would be at least reasonable…if not still somewhat persnickety.

Although I would still feel more confident doing 12*2.54*3.14 by calculator…

I don’t understand why you gave him $.02 either – that’s probably why he gave it back to you.

One example that happened to me just last weekend. I was at a store and I did hand the cashier a couple extra pennies. The cashier was so confused by those few pennies that she had to re-ring me up.

People usually get impressed that I can do basic math in my head like adding 2 digit numbers or dividing/multiplying by 2 or 3, but to me, it is something that anybody should be able to do.

Wouldn’t you want to hand them $10.03? Which just goes to show that none of us is free of errors. I will grant that I am more likely to view errors in a resume or cover letter with a raised eyebrow than in a blog. I recall back in the day when I was presented with a resume that was typed, copied and had been updated by adding a handwritten line at the bottom.

We had a no-frills chain grocery that opened some years back without scanners. The cashiers manually entered prices from memory. They didn’t seem to have a problem with hiring, and I believe that they were well-paid. They were also speedy.

What gets my goat is when I get a note from school that is filled with grammatical and spelling errors. I recognize that perhaps non-English teachers are not expected to be tops in writing, but I would expect them to at least be able to recognize their own deficits and run things through a spell checker, or a colleague, for correction of errors.

I also understand that some personnel, like bus drivers, are not expected to have advanced writing skills, but to my mind it does reflect badly when they are communicating poorly. I don’t mind them being hired–just wish they were getting some better on the job training to do all of the facets of their job–which sometimes includes written communication.

None of this, to my mind, springs from standardized testing.

I think that the title of the post is a little overblown – the “innumerate” are not generally unemployable; they are just not able to be hired at this particular haberdashery.

Nor are they particularly innumerate. The math they people can’t do in their head isn’t calculating 7% sales tax on $100. It is converting 5 yards of cloth to 5 meters, or determining how long a ribbon must be in centimeters to go around a cake with a 12 inch diameter.

While I can solve both of these problems without a calculator, I can’t easily do them in my head (and the expression on my face would not fill the customers with confidence, either).

I blame my teachers for allowing us to use pencil and paper as a crutch.

It seems like a reasonable standard to me. However, I wonder if such a standard would get a restaurant sued for discriminating against the foreign born.

I think being handy with mental math is useful, but primarily as a check on whether the result is plausible, given that the sales clerk is going to have to key in the figures anyway. I can do 15 percent value-added tax in my head, but if it were 17.8 percent? Or if it applied to all but two of eight items (as is often true of US sales taxes)? And converting the customer’s order from yards into meters (as required by the EU bureaucracy) seems a little much to expect.

If someone gave me $10.02 for a $6.53 total, I’d be puzzled too. But I almost never encounter someone who would be puzzled by three pennies.