Guest blog written by Art Bardige, Sustainablearning

The wonderful algebra suggestions of the Sept 26, 2012 article "N Ways to Apply Algebra With The New York Times" open the door to not only authentic problem solving in our algebra courses, but to a much deeper and more important question. Anyone in business today would immediately open a spreadsheet to work on any of these problems. They would copy or build tables, create graphs, play with formulas, and they would ask give themselves the opportunity to do the fundamental thing that spreadsheets enable us to do, ask "What if..."

Spreadsheets have become the mathematical laboratories for business, for science, for technology, and even for many consumers. They are the way we do our math, the primary tool for quantitative reasoning, and yet they are barely mentioned in our schools. They were mentioned only once in the New York Times article. They were mentioned only seven times in the Common Core State Standards in Math (fractions were mentioned 210 times). They are the primary mathematics tool of the 21st century, yet they are virtually invisible to most of our students.

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