New math didn’t add up in Cold War
By Burton W. Cole
Gather round, kids, and your ol’ Uncle Burtie will tell you about the time he went to war as a boy.
What’s that? Oh, all right, GRANDPA Burtie, if you insist. Great? Why thank you for thinking I’m awesome.
Anyway, this happened way back last century when I had just been sentenced to elementary school. Our nation, at the time, was heavily engaged in the Cold War with the Russians.
The grownups weren’t great at explaining to me what a cold war was. As near as I could imagine, it was fought in Antarctica, and the jeeps and tanks pulled by sled dogs. The soldiers built massive snow forts and fired giant snowballs at each other with bazookas.
A cold war sounded pretty cool to an 8-year-old.
Then the Russians struck a crucial blow. They launched a rocket into outer space.
We were losing the Space Race, which was part of the Cold War because, the best I could calculate, outer space isn’t heated.
The politicians and war officials — none of whom ever put on parkas themselves — decided someone had to be punished. Since us kids neither voted nor could get a hold of any of those bazookas that fired giant snowballs, it was us.
A group of scientists, without consulting any actual mathematicians, developed a beast called New Math, a complex system that was supposed to make us smart enough to catch the Russians and win the Cold War.
Under New Math, two plus two still equaled four — most of the time — but we had a whole new way of getting there.
We multiplied integers by secondary whole numbers, divided by binary digits factored to the Nth power, minus Bobby Sherman’s shoe size, plus the difference of a train going to Chicago at 65 mph while a car traveling to New York at 32 mph was looking for gas for 27 cents a gallon. (The answer is 2, but nobody knows why.)
Our parents couldn’t help us with homework. My mother, a once-intelligent woman, sprained her eyebrows several times furrowing over a third-grade math book.
“Why can’t you add the numbers like normal people,” she asked, clearly not understanding how much we need to win the Cold War. “They’ve got you going all the way around the mulberry bush — twice — and the weasel didn’t pop, it exploded.”
By the time we as a nation realized New Math didn’t work, my whole generation was so math deficient that we had to invent pocket calculators.
New Math is why now that I live 20 minutes closer to work, I figure I can sleep in 45 minutes longer.
It’s also why when I logged four hours of overtime, I went out and bought 17 hours’ worth of extra stuff. Under New Math, that computes. Unfortunately, bankers tend to be traditionalists.
Despite New Math, the United States was the first nation to bring moon rocks home, winning the Cold War. And there you have it — a generation of 2 + 2 = 4 was sacrificed over a box of imported rocks.
When I accidentally became an adult, the subject that puzzled me most was history. I’d lived through a large chunk of the events described in my daughter’s third grade history books, only I wasn’t paying attention because at the time, I didn’t realize it was history.
That whole Cold War thing was in her book. Of course, the details were wrong, not being the way I remembered them, and her books never mentioned a thing about snow bazookas, which was the best part.
I tried to help my daughter with history by sharing what I knew. It surprised me that her grades were so poor when I regaled her with so many facts they way I figured they ought to have happened.
“Dad, I could really use some extra credit now,” she said. “It would help if I had some Civil War artifacts to take in.”
“Don’t be silly,” I snapped. “I’m not that old.”
“Oh, not you,” she said. “You were probably just a boy back then. I mean Grandpa. Did he keep any Civil War artifacts?’’
“Probably not. He hadn’t saved any from the Revolutionary War when I asked him when I was in second grade.
“But here, how about this math book? It’s a genuine relic from the Cold War.”
Grandpa Burtie claims that he spent the best three years of his life in the fourth grade. Fix his facts at burton.w.cole@grmail.com or the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.