Disclaimer: Not aimed at any one person. Something that's been on my mind a while. Blah blah. You know the drill.
I've been thinking about the relative levels of prestige associated with verbal/written skills as opposed to mathematical skills, in the areas of the internet where I tend to hang out. I get the impression that it's the former that tend to be valued much more highly. I will say, though, before I go on that it's quite possible that this is only my perception because I'm primarily a mathematical person and am only seeing the bias in one direction, and that I'm actually quite wrong here.
The first thing that I notice is that the people who are given plaudits and marked as "really smart" tend to be those who write well; those who have large vocabularies and strong spelling and grammar, who can structure essays and make coherent and convincing arguments. In short, it's those who have strong verbal skills. Now, if we cast aside the question of whether or not smartness is something laudable, this is perfectly reasonable. We are, after all, communicating through a written medium, where our words are the main things that we see of each other. It's only natural that the most prominent form of intelligence should be the most recognised.
What's more concerning to me is the relative levels of stigma associated with poor skills in the two areas. People who can't spell can do all right for themselves on Usenet or LiveJournal or similar, where they can run everything through a spell checker (even though doing so is horribly tedious; I tend do so myself even though my spelling isn't too bad, partly because I consider it polite, and partly because I don't want the tedium of having my errors pointed out to me), but they tend to get hounded off the sort of IRC channel I tend to frequent. And God help the poor soul who has atrocious grammar.
In my experience, pointing out other people's spelling, grammatical and typographical errors is something which is considered to be "not cool" but it is recognised that a small amount of it is going to happen anyway. And of course, the more errors someone makes the more frequently they're likely to be corrected, and the more likely they are to get sick of it and up and leave.
Compare this with mathematical abilities. The ability to do basic mental arithmetic is not dissimilar to the ability to spell. Both are fairly simple. Both are learnable by most people, yet have some people with learning disabilities that makes it harder to do so. Both are first taught from a young age. Both get easier the more we practice them. And so on. In fact, the biggest difference that I can discern is that with spelling you just have to know, whereas with maths it's possible to work things out. If you don't know that "recommend" has one C and two Ms then you're stuck and the only way to spell it correctly is to look it up somewhere. If, on the other hand, you can't remember that 4*8=32 then you can add 8 to itself 4 times. And if you can't do that then you can start at 0, then count eight places, then another eight, then another eight, and then one final eight places, and you still end up at 32.
And yet there's no stigma attached to inability to do maths. On my current IRC channel of choice there is a bot who will do maths for you when you ask it. And people do ask it fairly frequently, in channel. Speaking to bots in channel when it's only of interest to yourself is another of those things which aren't cool but which get done anyway. And my sneaking suspicion is that it doesn't get frowned upon to a greater extent because "maths is hard" and it's only natural that people would need to get a computer to do it for them, even when it's very simple and basic.
This is completely the opposite of people's attitudes towards spelling. People "ought" to be able to spell, but it's natural and understandable that they can't do arithmetic? This makes no sense to me.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, or how I think things "ought" to be. I don't want to start stigmatising people who can't multiply 7 by 9, but equally I don't want to enter a world of txt spk with no attention to proper spelling at all. I guess just a bit more empathy and consideration all round might be a good thing.
(And for the record, I've just spell checked this, and had four spelling mistakes, one typo, and five instances which were marked as errors but were actually correct.)
Likewise, back when I was first learning spelling, it was something that I had to think about to get right. Since then, I've written and read enough that most words I can now spell without having to think about it at all. I think that the vast majority of people read and write more than they do maths, so there's a lot more opportunity for spelling to be internalised.
Oh, certainly there is... when your mother is a calculus professor and refuses to believe that you really have dyscalculia, and therefore the eighth-grade algebra you are now attempting to pass is beyond what your brain can do, just as lifting a 747 with your mind would be. Not that this happened to anybody I know. Ahem.
Seriously,
I grew up in a very math/science-centric environment and I tend to be surrounded by people who consider basic math skills and less basic math understanding just part of what a standard person ought to have. But verbal skills are the ability to convince people about stuff, so you can compensate for a lot with good verbal skills - including explaining to people in a convincing manner why they shouldn't bug you over your poor math skills.
On the other hand, we mustn't forget one very important thing. The internet might be used by language geeks to its full advantage, but it was built by all those mathsy type people who grok coding. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't be here pontificating about our arses on LiveJournal. We wouldn't be having flamewars on countless forums. We might all have homepages, but they wouldn't be pretty, they'd be eyesores built with angelfire.
In effect, the maths type geeks built the playground. They were nice enough to invite the language geeks, and the language geeks ought to remember that.
So far as real life goes, it's more socially acceptable to be utter shite at maths because it's not something everyone uses every day of their lives to communicate. If we communicated in numbers, it'd be a whole different story, but as it is, we use language, and if we can't use that, we're kind of buggered.
This said, maths should be better taught. I'm appalled at how little kids today seem to be able to do basic maths, because we do need it. There was that incident with the kid who couldn't subtract from 100 I LJed a couple of months back. At the age of 12, that should be simple. It's working in 10s, ffs! There's someone on kim's IRC channel who uses the bot calculator function all the time, to the point of absurdity. There's something wrong when you're using a calculator for sums that even I can do in my head.
My own fear of maths is related to discalculia. I just have problems with it. I'd love to be able to do maths, but I'm doomed unless I have an instruction sheet in front of me. Anyone who can do these complex equations in their head gets my complete respect.
I agree with you totally - I could do all those sums myself, but when working through something, using the calculator a lot, I just dump the figures to the bot without thinking and actually grok the result. Sometimes a really easy calculation comes up (say 10 times 10) I just input the figures straight onto IRC without actually grokking the figures and when I press "enter" I realise I can actually do it myself and get really embarrassed and try and ignore the derision I deserve. Think of it as a direct link between my eyes and my fingers - the numbers goes along the link between the eyes and fingers without going into my brain at all. Of course I'm just making excuses, and I promise I am able to calculate most figures myself - I can do a test if you want - I am just being careless and lazy.
Changing the subject slightly - I used to really love maths - I lapped up GCSE maths (got a B, would have gotten an A* if I bothered to work) and was really looking forward to A-Levels maths, but for some reason I got totally disillusioned and did really poorly, and went on to do really rubbish at uni. Software engineering has a fair bit of maths in after all. But then again, you could say that I was (and still am) disillusioned in everything ;) Maths still excite me especially when I'm (well, I was) doing programming, trying to figure out a complex maths problem was muchos fun. Of course, I've not done programming for well over 3 years (no, HTML, shell scripting, or 2 introducer courses on C++ and J++ isn't programming as you know) and miss it in one way for the maths thing. Consequently, I've gone out of practice. No excuses for using a bot to work out multiplies of 10 though ;)
Also I've done a fair bit of spelling mistakes in this comment, probably a few grammatical ones, and I hope that doesn't mean I'm an imbecile in rho's eyes ;) Thank $DEITY for spelling checkers. But seriously, getting back to rho's intended point, I have to disagree with you (rho) here, but Red has already stated the main reason for my disagreement - you use English to interact with people daily, while maths is useful, you don't use it with people every day if you know what I mean. But Red has done a really good comment, so I'm not going to blather any more about this subject.
And yes, this comment is pretty useless, because it's just saying "Hey I can do maths! My excuse is $WEAK_EXCUSE" and "Me too!" ;)
For the past three years especially, I've had it beaten it into my head that linguistic ability is NOT the same as intelligence, but it's still really hard for me not to conflate the two.
I think you're right that the stigma for people who can't spell is greater than the stigma for people who can't do math. But the upside is that people who are good at math tend to be seen as way smarter than people who are good at writing.