On Tuesday, Rome interviewed five people for warehouse jobs. If hired, these folks would be doing order fulfillment and packaging of orders for shipping. His boss gave him three math questions to ask each interviewee.
- How many inches are there in a foot?
- How many square inches are there in a square foot?
- What is a square?
The purpose of the second question is not to hear “144″, but to see if the person can get there. An acceptable answer would be “Whatever 12 times 12 is.”
For the third question, there were several answers that would have done just fine… i.e., something about four sides and all angles being the same. They got extra credit if they used the phrase “90-degrees”.
Four out of five interviewed were HS graduates. Two out of five could correctly answer the first question. No body was able to answer the second question. And none could answer the third question. One guy offered that there were three lines or three points in a square.
I’m not saying that this is the best our school system is putting out. That is clearly not true and would be a mis-representation of this small data set.
What I am thinking is that there are clear implications for our welfare system, our unemployment office, and our society in general.
