Remember math class your senior year of high school? Pretty meaningless stuff, for most of us. The answers were in the teachers' edition of the textbook, and our job was to figure out the formula and apply it, with as little thinking as possible.

We were being trained – and rewarded – to be impatient solvers of trivial problems.

Fast forward to our professional lives. Things are different now.

We engaged marketers know about patient problem solving. There are no problems in our businesses that are straightforward. That we can solve by applying a known formula. For which we have exactly the right information, no surplus and no deficit.

So why are we teaching kids a method of problem solving that has no use in the real world?

Check out this inspiring 10-minute talk by math teacher extraordinaire Dan Meyer: