Mathematics
Once again this subject appears on GMTV and once again the presenters completely undermine the message with giggles about how bad they were at the subject. Yes that's right kids don't bother learning maths and you too can present a TV show.
Emma obviously not reading her cues came out with "[percentage] of 11 year olds have the same maths skills as 7 year olds [repeating what was printed on the screen presumably in case we couldn't read and then added] this is despite them moving to secondary school at age 11"
Which I interpreted as - a percentage of 11 year olds have the same maths skills as 7 year olds despite being 11. Yeah.
Ben in a throwaway remark asked what 21 plus 19 was "I don't know" it's 40 you dunce yeesh it's 30 plus 10, or 31 plus 9 or 20 plus 20.
Coincidentally I had something similar just the other day "What's 172,000 divided by 21,000?" He'd grabbed the calculator and tapped in one seven two zero zero zero divide two one zero zero zero and wanted confirmation. I grabbed my calculator and tapped in one seven two divide two one and said "172 divided by 21 is about 8"
"Huh?" came the reply "I wanted 172,000 divided by 21,0000"
Even if I didn't have a calculator I could have gone 21, 42, 84, 168, so about 8. Pushed I could see that 172-168 is 4 which is a fifth of 20 so it's about 8.2; pushed again I could see that 4 becomes 40 which divides to 1 leaving 19 which becomes 190 and I already know 8 is 168 so it's really 8.18 or 8.19.
Seriously how hard is any of that?
My favourite bit was the despite funding totalling £X million maths skills are still low. See if you spend money you expect results end of story. Yeah if I hire some people to shift a heavy slab of something and it takes 10 people to move it, me hiring another 1,000 people won't shift it any quicker. It takes a paradigm shift in that I hire a crane.
So spending a wad of cash on this subject may not result in any differences if you're still teaching it exactly the same way you were prior to the cash injection.
8 comments:
Ah yes, twice as much money does not necessarily produce twice as much results as surely as two CPU cores do not necessarily do twice as much work as one.
As somebody else said, “one women can produce a baby in 9 months, but 9 women cannot produce a baby in 1 month”. (Although… 9 women could produce one baby every month… and boy, I'd do my best to help out! :-D Hehe.)
I should point out that while I know the difference between a difference equation and a differential equation and I'm quite happy to solve systems of linear equations by Gaussian elimination, I suck at arithmetic!I can shift formulas around, but actually doing calculations with numbers is something I suck at. I need pencil and paper and lots of time for that stuff. (But then, how many people shift algebra around without pen and paper?)
It seems I have the kind of brain that's easily confused by small details. For example, the dot product of two vectors is proportional to the length of the two vectors and the angle between them. That means that whether they are clockwise or anticlockwise controls whether the product comes out negative or positive. But exactly which way round is that? I have literally no idea. Every single time I need to know, I have to find out by experimentation.
Anything like left and right, where there are two (or more) identical choices that both seem equally plausible, I can never remember which is the right one.
(Working in Haskell, I constantly mix up left and right folds. One is tail-recursive, the other works on infinite lists. Which is which? I couldn't tell you.)
So, where there is more than one way to do a calculation, I tend to end up needlessly confusing myself, making stupid mistakes like having the wrong number of zeros, or multiplying instead of dividing.
Still, computers suck at algebra (unless you pay serious money for a CAS package). So I do the algebra, the computer does the arithmetic. We make a pretty good team… :-D
PS. If they want people to enjoy maths, how about this for motivation?
But at least you know where to start, it's the hosts who snigger that they were never good at maths while trying to encourage others that irks me.
Oh and yes I caught that link off your blog, very pretty now make it a screensaver :-P
Anyway as fun try the GMTV maths test with GCSE-level questions. Yes I got 10/10 with only one question causing a moment of thought that being the larger multiplication. If those are examples at GCSE level they seem a lot easier then I remember.
I won't ask you to do the spelling test damn 18/20 guess the two I got wrong.
Perhaps you missed the part where it says that my 30-second video represents 5 hours of computer time?
But yes, for some reason these days it's somehow “fashionable” to be stupid. I have no idea why. Once upon a time great thinkers were revered people. Today they're labelled as useless nerds and freaks. Whatever…
If I remember righly, on entry to college I had to do a math and a spelling test. I believe I scored 98% and 80%, respectively. (The test wasn't hard. We were entering for a computing course, after all.)
But you've got the frames now. Just run it forwards, run it backwards, then repeat ;-)
See if you can rent Idiocracy if you haven't already seen it; not the best of movies but makes a point.
Anyway so come on I want GMTV scores, just better not beat me on the spelling test.
Yes, it's true; I can't multiply 2-digit numbers mentally. (But then, in a GSCE test, I wouldn't be required to.) 9/10 = 90%.
(Also... one of the questions featured a really ambiguous diagram. If I'm not sure what you're labelling, I can't easily tell you much about it!)
As for making a screen saver... I have no idea how you actually implement one. There's probably some API for doing it, but I have no idea what it is.
Then don't multiply 2-digit numbers. Unless you can't handle 61*10?
61*10= 610
6*3=18
1*3=3
therefore 61*3=183
610+183=793.
You just break it down into easier components as with 21+19 = 20+20 or 172,000/21,000=172/21.
Hmm which ambiguous diagram? There was the triangle, the circle (twice) and the trigonometric function.
For the screen-saver I'm sure you know people who can assist on that front ;-)
"For example, the dot product of two vectors is proportional to the length of the two vectors and the angle between them."
It is the product of their lengths and the cosine of the angle between them.
"That means that whether they are clockwise or anticlockwise controls whether the product comes out negative or positive."
Umm, nope. Dot product is commutative, which means a.b is equal to b.a, so what you say can't possibly be true. No wonder you find it hard to remember which way around is which! The dot product only comes out negative if the vectors point away from each other; i.e. if the angle between them is more than 90°.
"Anything like left and right, where there are two (or more) identical choices that both seem equally plausible, I can never remember which is the right one."
I hope I'm never in front of you when you need to do an emergency stop!
"Working in Haskell, I constantly mix up left and right folds. One is tail-recursive, the other works on infinite lists. Which is which? I couldn't tell you."
That one's easy to work out. foldl has the constant at the left side, that is, the start of the list; foldr has the constant at the end of the list. Since you start with the constant, and infinite lists don't have an end, foldr can't work on infinite lists.
As for the baby thing: nine women can't make a baby at all. That's what they have us for. TBH, I'm not surprised that government people don't understand this. Some months ago I stopped being shocked at how many managers in my industry don't understand Brooks's Law (that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later). Luckily I think there is now one fewer than a year ago.
OK, so I meant “a function of” the angle. Sheesh. ;-)
And it seems that at some point I've mixed up the dot product and the cross product. (The cross product is definitely not commutative.) I think what I was getting at with the clockwise thing is that if you have a set of points that form a triangle and you take the cross product of two sides to find the furface normal, which side ends up being the “outside” depends on which way you enumerate the sides — and I never, ever get it right the first time.
What else are you dissing me for? Oh yes, babies. Well I'm told medical science has advanced quite far with this one, and men will be superfluous to requirements shortly. (As if we werent' already mostly uneeded now.) Personally, I think the human race will probably be better for it too.
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