Jimmy Buffett tweaks math, but teachers don't get the joke

By Laura Berman / The Detroit News

Ever since I learned that that a national association of math teachers is outraged by a new Jimmy Buffett song that makes fun of math, I've been doing calculations.

Math Suks, is the cheerfully repeated refrain and title of the song, released last week by Buffett, who's made and sustained a brilliant career by celebrating the spirit of adolescence, with a Caribbean twist.

What the song lacks in poetry, ("Math suks, math suks, I'd like to burn this textbook, I hate this stuff so much."), it compensates for in its direct, and irreverent, expression of math discomfort, one that many young people and adults share.

As someone who once slept on her geometry book and hoped for osmotic intervention, I can appreciate the appeal of Buffett's latest anthem. "Geometry, trigonometry, and if that don't tax your brain/There are numbers too big to be named."

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a statement last week, the very day Buffett's new CD was released, intoning that "in a world dominated by technology and computer-driven devices, today's students need to be inspired more than ever to learn and understand mathematics."

The council's president, Glenda Lappan, a professor at Michigan State University, told USA TODAY that the council's mission is to "warn the world that no, it's not funny. This is very serious."

Of course, math is serious business, in these mathcentric, high-technology times. And in a perfect world, we'd all have more positive attitudes toward computational skills.

But Professor Lappan's response -- telling people that they shouldn't laugh at Buffett's silly song and that he shouldn't sing it -- is precisely the didactic approach that turns off even motivated students.

There was a reason I read Faulkner's collected works in geometry class: The instructor could've put Albert Einstein to sleep. As he droned on, I read books -- and still have no idea what axiom A is, or when it's going to come in handy to know.

We laugh at what we fear, and for many of us, math is a source of real anxiety. As Talking Barbie likes to say, "Math is hard."

"There's no question that math scares many kids and adults," says Karen Moreno, a math teacher at Holly High School. "We have an English teacher who wants to crawl under her desk whenever she's presented with any math problem."

Moreno puts Buffett's song in the same category as Pink Floyd's line, "We don't need no education."

"It doesn't make our job any easier," she says.
Buffett's made a career out of an act that urges people to hang loose, laugh at our fears and enjoy ourselves as if we have no worries, even if that's only for a few hours at Pine Knob once a year.

Instead of lashing out at Jimmy Buffett, Professor Lappan should have plopped a parrot on her head and offered up some snappy math problem and nonalcoholic margaritas for public consumption. Or she might have considered singing a new ditty: "Why don't we get drunk and multiply?"

According to my calculations, Pine Knob will take in $522,604 from ticket sales at Jimmy Buffett's sold-out concert June 8. That's 7,274 seats at $46 each and 8,000 lawn seats at $23.50 each. Please feel free to check my math.

Laura Berman's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her by e-mail at lberman@detnews.com or phone (248) 647-7221.

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