Math Skills Your Child Will Need as an Adult

21st Century Skills and Math Education
What career does your child dream about? Chances are many of the best careers of tomorrow don’t even exist today. With the rapid changes in globalization and technology, predicting what the labor market will look like in 2030 is difficult. Even careers like nursing and law enforcement will use different tools and skills than the ones used today. So that puts educators in a difficult position. The education sector must respond to the change by anticipating and teaching the skills needed in the 21st century.

There are 4 skills most people agree will be necessary in a global, digital, and fast-paced economy. These skills are:
Critical Thinking
Creative Problem-Solving
Communication
Collaboration

What do these skills have to do with math? Read on!

Skill # 1 Critical Thinking
When there is a problem, people look for solutions. The key to finding the solution lies in correctly identifying the problem and then asking the right questions about it. Critical thinking requires curiosity and strong analytical skills.

What are the Challenges?
Information, from arcane Russian history to the latest cosmic super string theories, is readily available. You can access experts via email, YouTube, Wikipedia, and online learning courses. The body of human knowledge continues to grow exponentially as humans continue to share. The challenge is sifting through and using the mountains of information. Having access to knowledge is meaningless if you can’t find it, analyze it and apply it.

How Does this Apply to Math Education?
Students must go beyond memorizing formulas, algorithms, and tables that can easily be found with a couple clicks. Students need to think about how math can be applied in any situation. Is there a mathematical solution to finding a great prom date, like Scott Nash in A Beautiful Mind? Can you use math help to help you clean and organize your room?  Recognizing that math can be applied in different situations and then asking the right questions is an important skill. Of course, applying the math requires mathematical reasoning and fluency.

Skill #2 Creativity
There is no rule book for the problems of the future. Solving the problems of tomorrow will take innovation and creativity. Creativity is the ability to make new things and think of new ideas.

What are the Challenges?
Many people think of creativity as strictly an artistic pursuit. Creativity can be applied to any discipline. Think of the creativity of Steve Jobs, Madam Curie and Nikola Tesla. They saw opportunities and made connections that other failed to see. To foster creativity, people need to look at patterns and relationships and then see the potential for change. They must know how rules and norms can be manipulated for better solutions.

How Does this Apply to Math Education?
Real world math problems are not presented as a concrete set of math problems to be solved. Mathematicians use math to describe complex patterns like understanding whale songs, forecasting the stock market and just about anything you can think. Creative mathematicians might discover a new branch of mathematics or use math to map out the biosphere in a novel way. Whatever they do, they will be using math to see new connections and push creative boundaries. Children need to play with math, like they would play with blocks. They need to discover what works and why. Of course to do this they need strong foundational skills.  

Skill #3 Communication
As the problems of the world get more complex, people will need to specialize in their fields even more than they do now. This means that people will need to work in cross-disciplinary teams to benefit from the expertise of others. Teamwork requires strong listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills.

What are the Challenges?
In a global market place, we will need to communicate with people who speak different languages and have different cultures.

How Does this Apply to Math Education?
As a language, math is clear, precise and absent of emotion and nuance. If students are able to explain their ideas mathematically, language and cultural barriers almost disappear.  Math students must learn how to translate their thoughts into the language of mathematics.

Skill #4 Collaboration
Collaboration means working together to build, create, produce or improve. This requires the people to integrate critical thinking, creative problem solving, and communication. It also requires individuals to let go of competitiveness and embrace cooperation.

What are the Challenges?
Understanding and applying ideas from a new perspective takes a flexible mindset. It also means that people will need to understand that occasional dead ends is part of is part of the creative process. Thomas Edison had many failures on his way to inventing and improving things like the light bulb and the telegraph but he never let the failures stop his progress. He also worked as part of a team. He called his team “muckers” and they worked on improving his ideas until they were ready to market.

How Does this Apply to Math Education?
Math is a great way to collaborate. Mathematicians have been collaborating across centuries to solve mysteries of the earth. In school, children can learn great collaborating skills by working on a math problem together. Math class is a great place to learn to embrace mistakes as an important part of the learning curve.
 

Teaching 21st Century Skills in the Math Class of Today
Math classes need to provide more opportunities to explore how math can solve messy real-world problems. Children should work for extended time periods on a team. Perhaps kids could use their math skills to help a family decide what type of furnace to buy. They would have to figure in efficiency, the price of energy, and the family’s budget.  Or kids could use math to reduce car emissions in the school parking lot. Younger kids could work on grouping kids for carpool based on car size and schedules. Older kids could analyze and improve on traffic patterns to reduce idling time.

Grading these projects would be more complex than the traditional classroom model, but the kids would be learning important 21st century skills. They would probably feel more enthusiastic about math too!

Where Does Mathnasium Fit?
Mathnasium helps children build mathematical reasoning and fluency. This is a key component to critical thinking. We also play a lot of games and encourage math discussions to foster communication and collaboration. In the summer sessions we give fun challenges to promote creativity.