Saw the clip. The man has a point, or may have - I don’t know what point he actually is discussing without more context.But, speaking as a retired engineer, one of my pet peeves is the fact that grammar school teachers, and high school teachers other than math teachers, typically don’t know any math other than arithmetic. If that describes you, fine - but understand that that ignorance is only ignorance, not wisdom.
You can be quick and accurate at addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division - and even at taking square roots - without knowing the first thing about algebra or geometry, say nothing of calculus or vectors or matrices. The point is that, “word problems” aside, arithmetic is merely procedure to be learned by rote. Given that Roman Numerals are terribly awkward for arithmetic, for all their sophistication they didn’t do a lot of arithmetic, and if you could do long division you would undoubtedly be qualified to be a very valuable slave in Rome.
The clue in grammar school that I would be good at higher forms of math later on was that even though I disliked the rote addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division practice like everyone else, I enjoyed the word problems which most or all of my classmates despised worse than the number crunching practice. But of course the number crunching practice predominated in homework assignments, so mostly I just disliked Arithmetic and didn’t consider myself good at it. And the teachers didn’t pick up on it either, because they thought math was number crunching and nothing else. I remember Plane Geometry, in tenth grade, as the first class in which I showed up well in math.
So this is just Know-Nothingism.
If true, that is without doubt a rare event in the life of Ed Markey.