Almost every reporter and editor I’ve met in my career believes in the principle that journalists ought to cover the news impartially. But a few issues do bring many of us off the sidelines and turn us into advocates: Issues such as freedom of speech, the promotion of literacy, open access to government and physical protection for working journalists.
Here are two more we ought to add: The defense of science and the proper teaching of math.
It’s past time to lay aside the stereotype of journalists as mere literary wanna-bes, obsessed with language at the expense of arithmetic and the lab. The scientific method provides the foundation for human knowledge, and mathematics provides the universal language behind scientific method. As journalists, we’re in the same business as scientists and mathematicians – to investigate the world and describe its truths. The biggest difference is that they’ve got a longer and stronger track record of success than we do.
But we have more readers. Which makes our role in defending a replicable pursuit of the truth so important. Too many people in the United States despise science. And thanks to the indifference of too many others among the press and public, they’re getting away with dumbing down school curricula, sabotaging research and gutting public records. When we as journalists fail to do something so simple as check a source’s arithmetic, we create an opportunity for more bad data to make its way into public consciousness. We owe our readers better than that. Our profession ought to know good science, and good math, from bad and pass that knowledge on to our readers.
That’s one of the reasons why I’ve been trying for the past 10 years to teach journalists, as well as the public, better math skills. But an incident last week reminded me how far we have to go on even the simplest tasks.
My third-grade daughter brought home a math assignment involving percentages. The question offered a pie chart listing the percentage of energy provided by various sources in the U.S. and asked “How much more energy do we get from petroleum than from natural gas?”
My daughter took the easy route and tried subtraction: Petroleum’s 40% minus natural gas’ 23% equals 17%. But she looked at the pie chart, saw petroleum taking up over half again as much space, and said “That can’t be right.” She erased her figuring and wrote “About twice as much” for her answer.
My wife, taking this problem as too advanced for a third-grader, wrote a note to the teacher: “It’s not 17% more. It’s 17/23 [actually 74%] more. Not sure how to do this with 3rd grade math. She eyeballed it and said twice as much.”
A few days later, we got the assignment back. The teacher had marked the answer wrong, underlined the question, wrote “this means subtract,” noted where my daughter had erased her arithmetic, rewrote “40% – 23% = 17%” over it and added “She was right :-)”
Excuse me for a moment while I crawl under my desk and scream.
