SANTA ANA : Pupils Learn Math Adds Up to Success

Learning mathematics adds to your IQ and multiplies the chances of getting a good job. That’s the message students at Martin Elementary School heard Friday during a series of career day lectures.

About 1,300 students at the school spent the day listening to professionals, including bankers, aerospace engineers and firefighters, talk about the importance of math and other subjects in their daily work.

Principal Helen Matthews said that the program was designed “to let students know that all adults use math every day of their lives and that it’s important.”

Teachers hope students will become more motivated to do well when they see how education is required for many rewarding careers.

In one classroom, firefighter Larry Garcia asked a class of giggling first-grade students: “Do you like math?”

“Yeah!” they shouted back from their desks.

“Then keep studying because it’s really important,” Garcia told them.

Garcia and his partner Jeff Buckingham spoke about their jobs and demonstrated how they get dressed for work. Wearing a heavy yellow coat and breathing from an air bottle strapped to his back, Buckingham crawled through the classroom and carried out a girl to show how a rescue would be done in a burning building.

Garcia pointed to a girl in the audience who wanted to be a firefighter and told the class what a potential employer would want to know about her. “They would ask: ‘What kind of student is she? Did she get good grades?’ ”

Then, he asked: “If she was a bad student, do you think they would hire her? No, they wouldn’t because they need a good worker.”

Emphasizing the need for good math skills, Buckingham told the class that fire engineers need to make quick calculations of the amount of water to pump through hoses to firefighters, adding that “if he doesn’t do it right, he could hurt the firefighters.”

Later, fifth-grade students listened as Bob Kilman, an aerospace engineer for Rockwell International, described how he helps run space shuttle missions. He showed off pieces of the shuttle’s heat-resistant tiles and freeze-dried foods the astronauts eat in space.

“Every 90 minutes the shuttle circles the Earth,” he said, and math helps answer the question: “What time is the shuttle going to be at another place?

Between speakers, many students participated in math and logic exercises, such as designing towers made of toilet paper rolls, toothpicks, paper and other items. Students competed in teams to make the tallest tower and had to use reasoning skills and knowledge of weights and measures to finish the task.

Luis Garcia, 10, said he enjoyed the speakers, adding that math is important in his life too. “When I go to the store and buy things, I add things up,” he said. “If I don’t have enough money, I leave some things out.”