Old School School, Making the Class part 2

I'm not entirely sure why, but today when I sat down to try to flesh out my initial outline for the Math for Entrepreneurs class, I did so with a spiral notebook and a pen, not a computer. It's a completely different kind of thing than I'd ever done before. Not only am I making it out of nothing (or out of my head anyway, which is as close to nothing as you're gonna get around here), but I don't even know who is going to be in the class and how good at math they are.

This obviously poses some difficulty in creating a curriculum, but fortunately, I had the chance this past weekend to chat with my father, who is an honest-to-goodness rags-to-riches story who built a huge company out of nothing, and get his insights on just what sorts of math would be most helpful for the budding entrepreneur. His answer was pretty illuminating, in that all he said was, essentially, arithmetic.

Yep, my dad, with his PhD in economics and 50 years of business experience says that being able to add up a column of numbers and calculate a few rates and ratios is about all you need.

Honestly, I think he wasn't fully immersing himself in my query, but he did help me come up with the correct answer (at least I think it is) by stressing the simplicity of the underlying math skills necessary. Like most things, the base skill isn't nearly so important as knowing what to do with it.

There's always that undercurrent of "when am I ever going to use this?" in math class. I don't know why in math in particular, since you're never going to "use" history or French, at least not for anything important (yes I know these things are good to study, but exactly what important things happen in French these days?). In any event, it's a silly question and I usually answer it by saying "Never," because nobody's ever going to ask you to find the vertex of a quadratic equation.  Shoot, I'm a math teacher and nobody's ever asked me except in class. But people might ask you to find maximum profit or a minimum cost or how high will something go and I'll be darned, that's what a vertex is.

So for the purposes of this class, you will absolutely have to be able to do arithmetic accurately, but what's important is that you know what you're adding up. That's the part my dad left unsaid. The math is one of the underlying skills you need to be successful, but it doesn't get used in isolation. It gets used to answer questions, like are our sales growing or shrinking and at what rate, are our costs in line with our competitors, and are we making or losing money?

So I'm okay with an old school approach to outlining the class because I think it's going to be about that age-old question, "What the heck are we doing?"