User deleted post
View all comments
I think it's less a "mathematical" problem and more an "apply a simple mathematical concept to a real world problem".
It's likely worded this way completely on purpose and the teacher fell for the exact blunder the problem was meant to address: rote application of formula without thinking through the problem logically.
Yeah I had a math teacher who gave us a word problem about cutting circles out of a sheet of metal. Just taking the problem at face value, your first idea would be to just find out the area of the circles, and then find out how many times that fit into the area of the rectangle sheet. Easy peasy. Except little did we know, the math teacher was sitting there maniacally laughing while we figured it out so she could show us all that we forgot to take into account that these circles all had to be in circular shape to be cut out of the sheet. If you just take the area and divide it, you’ll have some circles in pieces around the edge that all add up to one circle, but it doesn’t count. So you also had to keep in mind the width of the circle and the width of the rectangle to find out how many circles actually fit in order to answer the question correctly. I hope this all makes sense, it’s easier to follow when it’s drawn out. This was her exact point though. Sometimes it’s easy to just do the math and assume it’s right, but you have to keep in mind the practicality of it. If you need 50 circles, and you think you can cut 50 because you did the math, then it’s going to ruin your day when you go to do it and find out you can actually only get 48. We definitely had some buthurt people in the class saying “well that’s not what the question asked!!” But they were just upset they missed it. We all did though, so I don’t know why they were so upset.
But they were just upset they missed it. We all did though, so I don’t know why they were so upset.
A lot of people really miss the forest for the trees on schoolwork. Either because of external pressure or their own self-driven pressure, they only see "right" and "wrong" answers and internalize that as the measure of success instead of the knowledge.
There is, of course, all that pressure that gets people on people to get perfect grades, too, so a wrong problem feels personal especially when you find out it was a "trick question" and you were likely always going to get the wrong answer. It's a huge problem with how we do certain types of education imo.
That’s a good point. The assignment itself wasn’t graded, so I wasn’t really looking at it that way, but I can still understand where that mentality would come from.
I actually really enjoyed that teacher and that class, but I often find I have a greater appreciation for my math teachers than most people in my classes. Especially if the teacher loves math. That’s infectious for me, and always makes me love the class. I sometimes find myself in situations where I’m like “what an amazing class/teacher!!” And everyone is like “I HATE THAT STUPID CLASS”