The school has a wide back!

Every time I publish a column about spelling, someone answers me something like this: “If musicians played as badly as people write, it would be a revolution. Music and French are two languages, it’s true. But reading notes is not an activity comparable to writing a text. And you rarely see xylophone or recorder teachers give dictations that consist of playing Pierre and the Wolf while the students write the score, trying not to make mistakes. I would be surprised if half of those who play music actually know how to read it. Most are unable to write it.

At school, in my music lessons, I learned to decipher a score, and I can tell you which note corresponds to which line, but I can’t recognize a note by ear.

I am a typical musical illiterate, the opposite of my friend Jérôme, professor of composition at Dalhousie University, who is one of the rare musical scholars. He writes it in his head, he transcribes it, then he plays it. Moreover, he confirmed it to me: even very great orchestral musicians, who read music marvelously, are incapable of writing it.

The music we hear, like speech, is a performance. With one difference: the musical performance is, very largely, repeated a priori, except perhaps for jazz, whose name comes from the French word “jaser”. And that’s exactly it: this musical genre cultivates a way of improvising like we talk. Conversely, when it comes to speech, the only thing resembling musical performance is the « scripted » speech of actors, comedians, lecturers, or newsreaders. Nobody talks like that.

When you ask a student of 5^and secondary to improvise a text in two hours, and to write it with as few mistakes as possible, it is useful to remember that this is an exercise that no musician is asked to do, except for licensed composers.

The case of mathematics

When it comes to spelling, we also hear more or less relevant comparisons with mathematics. A subject we think we know, because we all studied it for at least eight or nine years in primary and secondary school — much more than the xylophone or the recorder.

The figures are representations of quantity, and the 10 figures are used, by an infinity of possible permutations, to create numbers. Like music, the notation of numbers follows a logic of position. But it’s so concrete that children can quickly identify and transcribe digits and numbers.

Unlike music, mathematics, starting with arithmetic, has practical applications in everyday life, which consist in quantifying and measuring. Other symbols (+, –, x, √, ∑) indicate that the digits can be transformed into other digits. And that’s where it goes wrong.

Having done more than average math studies, and as I associate with a number of scientists, I would venture to say that only a minority of people know how to handle numbers correctly. Most engineers, physicists, mathematicians and actuaries are frequently scandalized by all the errors of comparison and appreciation they witness on a daily basis, and which stem from a lack of mastery of the mathematical principles taught in 6^and year, including fractions. During the pandemic, entire news stories were based on misinterpreting statistics and scientific data.

For example, any person well trained in mathematics sees the error in the sentence “we vaccinated 10 times less people today than yesterday”. Mathematically, “x times less” is impossible. If 300 people got an injection yesterday and 3,000 showed up today, there were 10 times as many. But if the group has gone from 3,000 to 300 individuals, we can speak of a 90% drop, since there were 2,700 fewer people than the day before (2,700 / 3,000 x 100 = 90%) . Or we can say that on the second day, traffic was barely “1 out of 10” compared to the day before (300 / 3,000 x 100 = 10% or 1 out of 10). In these last two examples, you cannot say « 10 times less » because the denominator is not 300 as at the beginning, but 3000.

The problem is illustrated in another way. If the 420 billion dollars in assets of the Caisse de depot et placement du Québec melt by 140 billion, we see a loss of one-third of the value, or 33% (140 / 420 x 100 = 33%). But if it starts from 280 billion and goes back to 420, how much is it up? The answer is 140 billion, so an addition of 50% compared to the 280 billion we had at the start (140 / 280 x 100 = 50%). If you thought 33%, you got the denominator wrong by putting 420 instead of 280. Incidentally, this example explains why, in finance, it is always more difficult to go up than to go down.

Mathematical writing is a language in the sense that apart from a few symbols, which make it possible to quantify, its sentences are equations. And this writing also works only if we combine the elements in the right order. A simple operation like division is actually an algorithm that combines various operations (multiplication, addition, subtraction) that must be performed in a specific order (if you do the operations in the wrong order, you arrive at a wrong result).

Of course, mathematics is a different language from those we use to write or music, and excelling in one does not guarantee that we will shine in the other.

Stop blaming the school

Some will tell me: what is the use of 11 years of French and 9 years of mathematics if half the population writes and counts badly? Is the school that bad? Couldn’t we do better?

Even if you can always do better, perfection is unattainable — as I have often written. We must not misunderstand the purpose of the school, which does not aim to make champions of spelling or mathematics, but to introduce the population to these notions, to give them something to get by and to enable those who have the math or language skills to discover themselves.

I think that people’s spelling and grammar problems are blamed a little too much on schools, and not enough on grammar and spelling itself.

When we consider music, mathematics and French, the problem arises differently. No one masters musical writing because no one teaches it. It would be possible, theoretically, for more people to succeed in musical dictation if we bothered to try, but I doubt we could do better than with spelling.

As far as math is concerned, we can console ourselves by telling ourselves that it would be even worse if we had kept Roman notation and asked young people to count on their fingers. What makes math easier is that we’ve stripped it of a number of historical nonsense, like Roman numerals. The Romans did not know the zero or the notation of numbers by columns. To multiply XLII by XVII, an engineer or accountant must have manipulated bundles of marbles to memorize the correct result, DCCXIV. Whereas a 12-year-old Quebecer can solve the equation 42 x 17 = 714 in 10 seconds without ever having thought about it before.

Logically, nine years of math should be enough to teach people how to get by with percentages, fractions and rules of three. This is not the case, because the discipline is abstract and the effort to translate a problem stated verbally into a mathematical formula is clearly beyond the strength of the vast majority, including many scholars. But at least we can be reassured: if we say « ten thousand eight hundred and ninety-four », most people will be able to write 10,894. That’s already it.

The written word should have the advantage of the concrete. It transposes something intrinsically human: speech. A horse, horses, it crosses the street. But writing has the defect of dragging a series of pans which make it very difficult to master. The Romans had created an alphabet of 23 letters which corresponded to the sounds of their language. We have maintained their alphabet, to which we have added three letters (J, U, W), to transcribe 36 phonemes. To solve this problem, different spelling conventions were developed in the Middle Ages, but they were then contradicted by other conventions, without canceling the first ones.

We carry all this illogical baggage by asking children to learn it. And it has been two centuries since the literate elite refuses any adjustment and any simplification of spelling conventions. Really, we don’t help each other at all to teach the language.