[podopie]

I pushed this comment out to my peers for a read first, but thought I'd share here as well. I've been in the author's shoes as both an English teacher and band director (at the same time), and disagree wholeheartedly. As others pointed out, he's comparing hard skills (math) and soft skills (gained from anything, but in this particular case football and band).

No kid asks when band or football is going to be useful in their life because they already have a premise around it: start from the bottom, and you have four years to become a leader. Math doesn't provide this opportunity, because the moment you get a passing grade in a math course, you move on to the next class. There's no leadership here. No opportunity to lead that class you passed with what you now know. Nothing shifts. On another note, you do gain group work skills and peer bonding, like in other said activities.

The calendar thing pisses me off, like him, but for other reasons.

Primarily, this isn't because people don't know math. It's because they don't want to do it. We're currently in an era where it's easier to share information--good and bad--than for us to figure it out on our own. The problem here isn't that no one knows math, it's that "share" and "be a sheep" is much higher on everyone's bucket list than "do something by myself and learn from it." This is especially with kids. Instead of frustration, however, he's provided with a the perfect warmup problem. Ask kids to figure out if the answer is true or not using what they know about math, five minutes pass, and you show them how to handle it. You make two points now: math is useful, and don't always believe everything that gets shared around the internet.