Do the maths or pay the price: SA’s numeracy crisis

Boy is using a calculator to do his homework. Picture: iStock As teaching aids go, the metallic silver BMW M3 I was using to help my wife teach a maths literacy class was a head-turner. Her Grade 11 pupils oohed and aahed and got the obligatory selfies with the car.

The wows got even bigger when I asked one of them to sit in the driver’s seat, call up the trip computer and give me a fuel consumption readout. That took a bit of prompting. Then I got another girl to use my laptop to go to the BMW online site and find out the size of the M3’s fuel tank.

Here’s the problem girls: How far can you go with a full tank at the current consumption? For many, I could have just swanned down the steps of an alien spaceship in a glittering silver cape. They pecked away at their calculators and one, bouncing up and down, put her hand in the air, “3.95 sir!” I broke it to her gently that 3.95km was less than the distance to the nearby shops – and that on those 63 litres of fuel, an entire Formula One grid would cover that distance.

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This wasn’t a case, though, of it being an unfair question to people who were not petrolheads. And, to be fair, she had the numerals correct – but the decimal point was, wrongly, two places to the left.

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