It is a common refrain that Oregon high school students are not good enough in math. But most of us have no idea what we are talking about.

If we did know, we would probably shut up. Because most of us are no good at math either, at least some of the math that high schools try to teach in the junior and senior years.

Take a look at a syllabus for algebra II being taught in high school classes intended for grades 11 and 12. Take a look and blanch.

If it’s been 40 years since anybody quizzed you about this, you will get a headache over problems intended to force students “to identify field properties, axioms of equality and inequality, and properties of order that are valid for the set of real numbers and its subsets, complex numbers and matrices.”

Or how about this: “The student will recognize multiple representations of functions (linear, quadratic, radical, absolute value) and convert between a graph, a table and symbolic form. A transformational approach to graphing will be employed.”

The actual equations may look vaguely familiar, but the language alone is likely to confound the average adult.

Here’s the problem with math in 2008: Most people can get through life perfectly well after they forget whatever they learned in trigonometry and calculus. They forget it because they don’t need it.

You need no quadratric equations to work in most trades, professions and other service industries. You can be a production supervisor, a health care specialist, a real estate developer or a politician without knowing the first thing about the properties of conic sections or the zeroes of polynomials.

It’s a good thing that somebody knows about these things, because they are obviously useful in science and technology. But they are not necessary to figure the amount of tax on a purchase in sales-tax states. They are not useful in drawing up a household budget, calculating your vehicle’s fuel efficiency or figuring out the amount of carpet needed to cover the floor of the den.

Most people are never called on to calculate the trajectory of a rocket to Mars. For most us us, run-of-the-mill arithmetic gives us all we need. (hh)