It's complete bogus! Being good at fractions at a young age is no guarantee for a steady sorted life at all!
I was the first in my class to understand how fractions worked, and I was kick ass good at it as well... And here I am... 29 and single...
;)
Same here - and I'm 46! ;-)
But, I think, Taeko is not alluding to people who are good at math (on the contrary, math ability is usually correlated with nerd-ness, and -roughly- low worldliness and social skills...), she is alluding to people that "just do as they are told", and don't complicate their lives posing questions and critics...
Exactly.
In that scene we see she is not dumb. She was trying to understand the division process in her own, creative way.
Meanwhile, her sister didn't even understand it, she just memorized the formula. She just did as she was told.
I thought that was a great indictment of education in-general. Kids learn stuff by rote, but do they learn how to learn? I know that's the goal for some educators, but the result seems to be that very few kids get there, at least, because of school.
It's one of many ways this film just subtly touches on something and lets us, the viewers, ponder the implications of intelligence and knowledge, what it takes to "make it", what a grade means and what it meant, and things like that.
I believe Taeko, dealing with personal issues such as being single and aimless at 27, is recalling the negative comments made by her family (said with clear shame and worry) and teachers (presumably).
The nice thing is, she shares this thought with Toshio, who doesn't give a hoot about fractions and other intellectual things.