Fractions should be scrapped!!

In a country already lagging behind most nations in the world, in terms of mathematical skills of high school students, we now have University of Pennsylvania professor, Dennis DeTurck, proclaiming, “Down with fractions! They are obsolete.”

His inspiration is that, “Mathematicians are always questioning the axioms. Everybody knows that questioning those often results in the most substantial gains in terms of progress” and so he has dared to question the axiom of teaching fractions. While it is true that questioning is often the seed of change, it is also true that questions asked just for the sake of questioning are plain idiotic. And when DeTurck adds, “The study of fractions should be delayed until it can be understood, perhaps after a student learns calculus”, this begins to sound like (a) either an April fool’s joke or (b) DeTurck is in urgent need of a brain checkup. I don’t know about Dr. DeTurck, but I learnt fractions when I was about eight years old, and calculus when I was sixteen.

I am not going to explain in detail why it is necessary to study fractions even in this digital age. Instead let me just quote Pennsylvania State University professor, George Andrews, “Arithmetic is the basic skill. If children do not know arithmetic, they can't go on to algebra, which leads to calculus. From there you go on to other things”.

However, I disagree with Dr. Andrews when he adds that, “DeTurck's ideas will unfortunately gain traction because of the misguided belief that math education can somehow be made easy. Math is hard. The idea that somehow we're going to make math just fun is just a dream.” First of all I am not pessimistic enough to believe that an absurd idea can succeed just because somebody has voiced it. And second I do not subscribe to the, ‘Math is hard’ line. When I was a child there was a period when I was doing poorly in Math and was under the impression that it was because Math is hard, and I just wasn’t able to get it. The real reason I was doing poorly was - I never opened my Math book and did the homework while going to school in the school bus. Fortunately I was rescued from this state of affairs by a tutor, who showed me that the people who get Math, are the people who sit down and do it. Once you sit, open the book and start cracking some problems, Math is more fun than playing a video game. I am profoundly grateful to that tutor.

Rather than going about abolishing fractions, we need to communicate the joys of fractions to our kids. And to impression kids with the notion that Math is hard and only for a chosen few is just as bad as doing away with Math altogether. If you put a ‘haunted’ sign in front of a building, how many adults (let alone kids) are going to live in it? Dr. Andrews says that the idea that we can make math fun is just a dream. On the contrary, the dream is that Math is hard. Once you wake up, you find that it is fun.

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