Addendum to yesterday's post

[plonq]

Given some of the responses, I decided that this warranted a follow-up post.

To clarify, I am not siding with the snarky customers who were taking pot-shots at the girls who couldn't figure out their change.  Taking sarcastic jabs at a retail employee who is caught in an unexpected bind accomplishes nothing and simply reveals you as an asshole.  The girl who posted the original entry had obviously never been trained in how to manually count change, but that's not the point of my previous post.

My point of concern was with the people who were responding in the thread, some of them admitted university graduates, who argued that manually counting change was too complex to be learned because math is hard.  One might be excused if, on reading their remarks, one thought that the discussion centred on proving Fermat's last theorem rather than simply counting up by 5s and 10s.

Our schools are failing us.

Comments

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Hey, even I get confused with US coins...
This doesn't happen anymore, but when I used to visit as a kid I used to HATE dimes.
Why?
Because they (frigging) say "One dime", that's not helpful when you were taught "one two three four five six seven eight nine ten"; and when you're used to every coin and bill having a BIG number with their face value; not just in Mexico, but in Germany (that I visited a lot more than the US as a piglet).
Quarters were slightly less problematic in figuring it out because I knew what the word "quarter" meant =P

It was and sometimes still is confusing to think of the "best" way to ive change (or pay for something with exact change) when you have .01, .05, .10, and .25 coins... .25 beinf the confusing one for me. We have .05 (in the process of being retired), .10, .20, .50 ; and for some reason it's easier for me to count changes using those numbers.... perhaps cause I'm used to that =P

[(Anonymous)]

The schools' may be failing us but this is not a very good example. I seriously doubt that there are any high school graduates who can't count to 100. It's much more likely to be a matter of training and/or performance anxiety. Counting out change is not something a clerk has to do on a regular basis and if the clerk has doubts about his/her math ability, he/she may well panic.

[farlo.livejournal.com]

Counting change is hard math. Not because the task itself presents any special difficulty, but because at that moment you, the change counter are the center of anxiety and attention for at least one or more people that wish you would desperately hurry the F8 up.

Try drinking a glass of water under the same circumstances without dribbling ... or looking like one of the "differently abled".

:) HTH