By Dave Philipps - The Gazette

A train leaves Colorado Springs at 9 a.m. bound for Boulder, Colo., 100 miles away. It travels at 50 mph and has to pick up passengers every 25 miles. Each stop takes 10 minutes, and after each stop, the increased passenger weight causes the train's speed to decrease by 10 percent.

When will the train arrive?

A) about 11:52 a.m.

B) about 11:22 a.m.

C) I would rather throw myself in front of that train than figure out when it's going to arrive. Why do I need to know this stuff anyway? Smart people just look at the freakin' train schedule.

Any guesses which answer most Americans might pick?

Here's a hint. This country isn't particularly good at math. Pop culture generally paints anyone who is as a geek. And a fraction of the population des-pises arithmetic so much that the mere thought of word problems makes them break out in a cold sweat.

Not everyone, of course. There are people who enjoy math, just as there are people who enjoy sitting behind drivers going 35 mph in the left lane. On the whole, though, we don't just loathe it. We fear it.

"Math is right up there with snakes, public speaking and heights. By far it's the least favorite of the three R's," wrote Marilyn Burns in her 1998 book "Math: Facing an American Phobia."

Calling math a national phobia might be pushing it, but people in the U.S., on average, definitely don't do numbers well. American students tested in 2005 scored lower than their peers in South Korea, Japan, Germany and 20 other countries including Poland, Hungary and Spain, according to a study funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

Ask Americans how they feel about their country's math students scoring so far below average and most respond, "what's an average?"

Just kidding - things haven't gotten that bad, but kids do seem to run from math like no other subject.

"I stopped taking math as soon as I could. I just didn't have a mind for numbers," said Rhonda Ellis, a retired receptionist. "Now my grandkids are the same way. I think they'd do anything to get out of doing it."

Even math teachers didn't always like math class.

"I hated it," said Elizabeth O'Keefe, who teaches fifth grade at Jackson Elementary School. "Kids are still afraid of things like long division. Sometimes there is crying."

In the Pikes Peak Library District's catalog, "math anxiety" has is its own subcategory, while spelling or geography anxiety or even "Compare James Joyce to Marcel Proust" anxiety do not.

This isn't unusual. Kids who can shovel their way through more subjective disciplines often crumble under the precise answers required by math.

Fortunately, O'Keefe said, teaching techniques are becoming more enjoyable and effective, and most districts have math specialists to give kids help.

But, she said, math still takes a back seat to reading, and the longer kids struggle with math, the better they get at learning to slide by.

"A lot of my students are great at other subjects and they come to me saying they just can't get math. They hate it," said Kris Darling, a software engineer who runs My Darling Tutor in her free time.

She sees the same equation over and over. A student is fuzzy on one math concept but tries to slide by. Then the teacher adds more and more concepts. Eventually, it equals frustration, even tears.

"Usually, if I can take them back and make them comfortable with the original concept, their confidence grows, and they are (able) to apply themselves and understand new concepts."

Then she warns the students that if they don't ask questions in class, they may fall behind again.

Of course, there are kids who throw up their hands and say: "Why do I need to know this? I'm never going to use it."

Darling points out that, as a software engineer working on Global Positioning System software, she uses it every day. If her calculations aren't right, boats may veer into reefs, hikers may walk off cliffs, car navigation systems may direct drivers to the bargain liquor barn instead of the church basement meeting for Alcoholics Anonymous.

"GPS is just geometry. Students can understand that. It's real to them," she said.

After a few weeks of extra help, many of Darling's students catch up to the rest of the class.

But other students who suffer from early onset math phobia never learn. They squeak by and emerge in the adult world with almost no math skills. Author John Allen Paulos calls this condition "innumeracy," a syndrome he defines as "an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance." Like people who are illiterate, innumerates scrape by in daily life. They don't really get why 10 percent is a small amount when it's a discount on a pair of sandals but a huge amount when it's the interest rate on a 30-year mortgage (maybe $400,000).

They think it's a typo that the Colorado family's median income ($55,883) and mean income ($49,284) aren't the same, because they were passing notes when the teacher explained that mean is an average of a group of numbers, and median is the middle number of the group.

They don't understand why they can roll a die six times without coming up with a one, even though the probability of rolling a one is one in six.

Some end up coming to Ed Liptak, an adjunct professor at Pikes Peak Community College.

"Maybe they want to go into nursing or get some other degree. They didn't care about math during high school, but now they need it to get that job," Liptak said.

They may not like it, but now they have to get it.

"So I try to make it practical. They don't need to give a crap about square roots. I teach them how to plug numbers into equations, some percentages, some fractions," he said.

Most important, he tells them that if something doesn't make sense, ask, don't wait.

It's not like literature, where if you fail to understand Shakespeare, you can still dig Kurt Vonnegut. Everything is based on what you've learned before. And don't forget it.

Even people who dropped math as soon as they could, and don't go near it in real life, might someday unexpectedly benefit from a little impromptu arithmetic.

Here is a real example taken from a recent Gazette story: Amy Lillard, who owns a small vineyard in France, had 8,500 liters of wine she needed to bottle and store. Each bottle is 700 milliliters. Once bottled, the wine was placed in six-bottle boxes that measure 30 centimeters by 20 centimeters by 20 centimeters. Her wine storage garage is 8 meters wide, 12 meters long and 3 meters high.

How many bottles should she order, and will all her wine fit in the garage?

Answer: 12,142 bottles, which go into 2023 boxes, if you round to the nearest full box. The garage has room to stack a 40 by 40 layer of boxes, 15 boxes high, or 24,000 boxes. Since this is more than the number of boxes she has, they fit.

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© 2006, The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.).

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