Some years ago, the phrase “math anxiety” became popular to describe the difficulty many students had with learning elementary math skills. I haven’t heard it much lately. Maybe because I am no longer in the “ed biz” or maybe because the public discourse has become dominated by politics.  But the issue has not gone away. Indeed, I will argue that it is, and has always been, a serious problem for adults -- especially for the adults who govern us and who run the news media. Sixty years ago, Cambridge scholar and physicist Charles Percy Snow delivered an influential lecture entitled “The Two Cultures,” which posited that intellectuals are divided into two distinct camps, Science and non-Science. There is some overlap, but it is nearly all by scientists who love music or literature, not by poets who love algebra. A popular acronym these days is STEM, shorthand for Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. It is generally thought that...(Read Full Article)