Numeracy Quotes

“I started crossing the number seven when handwriting it as people kept mistaking my sevens for ones. I thought that would clear up any confusion. That was until people started asking if my crossed sevens were now nines. So basically, I should avoid handwriting numbers if at all possible!”
― Stewart Stafford

“I learnt that in teaching young children the concept of number, you should start with the concrete, then move to the pictorial, before finally representing numbers in the abstract. I learnt that children should be encouraged to articulate their processes, and feed back to each other on whether they are right or wrong, and why. And I learnt that this is so children understand number concepts, not just procedures, because (though not only because) the PSLE tests understanding, not just memorisation. As I was chatting to the professor in the car as she gave me a lift to the station, she also expounded on the importance of teacher-student relationships – 'you can't touch their brain until you have touched their heart'.”
― Lucy Crehan, Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers

“Members of society who are wealthy, or whose livelihood is guaranteed by an institution, or whose religious commitments ensure that they will never have to choose between abortion (or other forms of birth control) and being saddled with the many burdens of parenthood—all these sheltered classes can easily approach all moral problems on an exclusively literate plane, with comforting words that give no hint of numerate realities, including the afflictions that time will bring. Margaret Sanger's experience as a nurse in daily contact with the wretchedly poor made her see the numerate realities that were effectively invisible to the sheltered classes — until she rubbed their noses in raw life. Opening the eyes of the socially blind required the creation of new terms: birth control in 1914 and planned parenthood in the 1930s. Literate approaches frequently deceive, but (with imagination) words can be made to serve the goals of intelligent numeracy. Compassionate souls soon see that all of society benefits when women are freed from the necessity of bearing unwanted babies. (It is remarkable how often a human ostrich who seeks to impose compulsory pregnancy and mandatory motherhood on women lightly belittles a woman's request for an abortion as being no more than a "whim.")”
― Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia