I'm a math tutor now working at a middle school. My students have a regular math class; I'm paid to help them fill in gaps in learning. This is under a COVID-related grant.
They're reviewing for a final and here is one of the practice problems:
"Mr. Jeans raises cows (x) and chickens (y) on his farm. Altogether, his cows (x) and chickens (y) have 140 legs. This can be represented by the function 4x + 2y = 12."
WTF? How is it not 4x + 2y = 140?
Students are told to "solve for and interpret the x and y intercepts in context," whatever that means.
But more mysteriously, why does the teacher (or whoever wrote the problem) have their students graphing the wrong freakin' line? The proper line has a y intercept of 70, not 6.
The lines are parallel, so the slope is the same.
One thing my students are almost universally bad at is turning word problems into equations. My students didn't understand why it's 4x and 2y, until I pointed out cows have 4 legs and chickens have 2. I could not convince a girl yesterday that a negative number subtracted from a negative number will be negative. "Uh-uh!" say the little miscreants. "My teacher said 2 negatives make a positive." I explained that only works for multiplication and division.
Arghh.
They're reviewing for a final and here is one of the practice problems:
"Mr. Jeans raises cows (x) and chickens (y) on his farm. Altogether, his cows (x) and chickens (y) have 140 legs. This can be represented by the function 4x + 2y = 12."
WTF? How is it not 4x + 2y = 140?
Students are told to "solve for and interpret the x and y intercepts in context," whatever that means.
But more mysteriously, why does the teacher (or whoever wrote the problem) have their students graphing the wrong freakin' line? The proper line has a y intercept of 70, not 6.
The lines are parallel, so the slope is the same.
One thing my students are almost universally bad at is turning word problems into equations. My students didn't understand why it's 4x and 2y, until I pointed out cows have 4 legs and chickens have 2. I could not convince a girl yesterday that a negative number subtracted from a negative number will be negative. "Uh-uh!" say the little miscreants. "My teacher said 2 negatives make a positive." I explained that only works for multiplication and division.
Arghh.
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/jq5wbkp
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