A grown-up’s guide to math
DOUGLAS POTVIN believes he can help adults learn basic skills with his new workbook
Teaching adults is not as simple as relying on a high-school textbook, former mathematics teacher Douglas Potvin tells Janet Bagnall. Potvin, who once taught Finance Minister Jim Flaherty at Loyola High School, has designed a workbook specifically written for grownups who have families and jobs but who need or want to understand basic math.
For all of us who needed to conquer basic mathematics but never have, LaSalle’s Douglas Potvin thinks he has the solution. An 82-year-old former mathematics teacher, Potvin has written Understanding Basic Mathematics: A Practical Workbook for Adults.
The key, Potvin says, is that his 344-page self-published workbook is written for adults. It’s not a math textbook for high school students doing double duty in adult ed. It’s not a teacher’s manual. Instead, it’s a workbook specifically written for grown-up people who have families and jobs but who need or want to understand basic math.
“Adult education is not geared to adults,” Potvin said in a recent interview. “It’s always been a problem.”
Adults as students are different from young students in several ways, said Potvin, who during his years at Montreal’s Loyola High School, taught federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty — a “good student.”
“High school students arrive in class with roughly the same knowledge, but adults don’t. Their background knowledge is heterogeneous, and because their backgrounds are so diversified discussions of math problems tend to be at a higher level.”
Potvin said for most adults studying is a third priority, after family and work. “They probably learn faster because time is so precious to them,” he said. “And you have to treat them differently. They have to have flexibility about handing in assignments. You might have someone who was travelling for business all week.”
Potvin first had the idea of producing a basic math book for adults in 1968 when he attended an education conference in the United States and found teachers were using the same math textbooks for evening classes as they did for Grade 6 classes.
By 2000, when he was in Guyana on special assignment to upgrade the knowledge and skills of the country’s math teachers, he assumed someone else must already have written a basic math book for adults. Wanting to find out, he did what everyone did in 2000 and searched the Internet. There was no such book. More than three decades after he first realized it was needed, Potvin began writing his text.
There are basically three reasons adults go back to school to take classes, said Potvin, who earned a doctorate in adult education in 1978 from Boston University. Some adults enjoy learning; it’s a lifelong pleasure for them. A second group is composed of adults who are what Potvin describes as “goaloriented” — for instance, teachers whose salaries will increase if they take extra courses. Or, as happened in the 1970s with reforms to Canada’s tax law, adult math courses were “flooded with accountants,” Potvin said.
A third group comprises people who use learning as a way to find friends and have a social life, he said. “A lot of them found out that they could understand math for the first time,” Potvin said.
A small warning, however: Potvin does not promise to help Quebec parents struggling along with their children in the province’s compulsory math courses 426 and 526. “I don’t know how parents manage them,” Potvin said. “The teachers are having trouble with them.” His text book will get you up to Grade 9, Potvin promises.
Is that far enough? You be the judge. Here’s a problem:
Among the members of a club of 54 people, 12 do not play organized sports, 33 play football and 22 play basketball. How many play both sports? How many play one sport only? (Answer is below.) A launch for Understanding Basic Mathematics: A Workbook for Adults, will be held Wednesday at Loyola High School, 7272 Sherbrooke St. W., from 5 to 7 p.m.
(Answer: 13 play both sports; 29 play one sport.)