Cosmo: I dropped out of Year 11 maths for a good reason. I'm doing a degree in Film Studies because I'm in the business of telling stories.
Beat.
Eppy: you're wrong.
Cosmo: about what?
Eppy: about math, and story-telling. The single most important story that mankind ever told was about math. That's why, in every culture, that ever existed, in some way, in some form, they articulated that one plus one equals two.
I know very little about mathematics, but I do occasionally tutor mathematics, and very seriously thought about teaching Junior maths in a high school. I was always bothered by the bland problems students had to solve because they seemed totally uninteresting and irrelevant. Here are two actual NCEA Level 1 problems:
An adult movie ticket is
$5.00 more than a child movie ticket.
6 child movie tickets and
9 adult movie tickets costs $225 altogether.
What is
the cost of 1 adult movie ticket?
Michelle has twice as much
money as Nicola. If Nicola is given $60, she will now have twice as
much money as Michelle. After Nicola has been given the $60, how much
money would Michelle need to be given so they have the same amount?
Remember to show algebraic working, including at least one equation.
Who could give less of a s*it? Not me, certainly. So, whenever I tutor mathematics now I always write my own worksheets. Here are some of the good ones I've written:
3: The Love Life
of Jamie and Sophie.
Jamie wishes to
place an ad in the Lonely Hearts section of the North Shore Times.
The NST charges a fixed fee of $35, plus $2 per word.
a) write a formula
which demonstrates how the NST charges people in the Lonely Hearts
section.
b) Jamies spent
$717 on his ad. How many words did he use?
c) Jamie gets a
reply from his ad from a girl called Sophie. Jamie and Sophie agree
to meet for a date. At 5pm, they begin walking towards each other.
Jamie walks at 6km per hour. Sophie walks at 5 km per hour. After
twenty minutes, they meet. How far apart were they to begin with?
d) For their second
date, Jamie and Sophie meet up after their work day is over (they
both finish work at 6pm). They are 4.5 km from each other and are
walking. How long does it take them to meet?
e) Sophie starts
dying of tuberculosis. Jamie will spent three days during his work
weeks, W, with Sophie, but has also taken three weeks of
vacation time to solely spend with Sophie. Create a formula which
calculates how many days they will spend together.
f) Sophie dies on a
Tuesday. Jamie and Sophie spent 88 days together while Sophie was
dying. How many of Jamie's work weeks did Sophie live with
tuberculosis?
4. Miller runs a
Business.
Miller wants to
start his own IT company, Miller's IT Company. He will pay
Scott $40 an hour and Maggie $30 due to the wage gap and systemic
societal issues about gender and women in the workplace. On top of
this, Miller must also give Maggie $320 as a sign-on bonus, and Scott
will receives the same bonus plus an extra 25% of that because he is
a man in the workplace.
Create a formula to
figure out how much Miller will have to pay his two employees based
on the number of hours they work.
5. Dutchie and
Becca go to dinner.
Dutchie and Becca
go to dinner at a restaurant Ray's where they have 2
all-you-can-eat-free coupons, and intend to put Ray's out of
business.
a) Becca will eat
three times the number of pork ribs that Dutchie eats as a challenge.
If Dutchie had eaten another 104 ribs, he would have eaten 9 times
the number of ribs that Becca ate.
How many ribs did
Dutchie and Becca eat?
b) Dutchie drank
four more cans of Sprite than Becca did. In total, they drank 54 cans
of Sprite.
How many cans of
Sprite did Becca drink?
c) The chocolate
fudge cake at Ray's has four more pieces to it than the
lemon-raspberry cheesecake. Dutchie and Becca order 6 lemon-raspberry
cheesecakes and 13 chocolate fudge cakes. Altogether, they have 156
slices of cake.
How many slices are
in one chocolate fudge cake?
d) Dutchie orders
four more shrimp cocktails than Becca. If Becca had order 26 more
shrimp cocktails, she would have gotten 3 times the number that
Dutchie had ordered.
How many shrimp
cocktails did Becca and Dutchie order?
e) The Ocean
Supreme meal has 4 more oysters than the Ocean Platter meal. The
Ocean Deluxe meal has 19 more oysters than the Ocean Platter meal.
Dutchie and Becca order 7 Platters, 11 Supremes, and 17 Deluxes. In
total they have 543 oysters.
How many oysters
come in one Ocean Platter meal?
f) The owner of
Ray's, Maggie kills the annoying couple ordering obscene
amounts of food. Dutchie has 1.5 litres of blood more than Becca.
When Maggie exsanguinates the bodies, she gets 11.5 litres of blood
from them. How many litres of blood did Becca have?
..
Wouldn't it be awesome if we used maths in schools to talk about issues in real life? Yes it would, but unfortunately, students ask "when am I ever going to use this?" and they're right to ask that question. Mathematics is usually taught very poorly because students cram geometry, quadratic equations, probability, numeracy, statistics, algebra, and more without really being told when it's going to come up in the real world (I think English, and the Arts in general also suffers this pedagogical problem). "It'll all make sense when you're older" isn't just infuriating, it's condescending, it's insulting, and it has no place in a classroom. If you're teaching something, you need to remember that you're not teaching kids. You're teaching kids how to be adults, and it needs to make sense now.
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