this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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That's one of the big problems with maths teaching in the UK, it's almost actively hostile to giving any sort of context.
When a subject is reduced to a chore done for its own sake it's no wonder most students don't develop a passion or interest in it.
In the US it's common to give students "word problems" that describe a scenario and ask them to answer a question that requires applying whatever math they're studying at the time. Students hate them and criticize the problems for being unrealistic, but I think they really just hate word problems because because they find them difficult. To me that means they need more word problems so they can actually get used to thinking about how math relates to the real world.
There are three problems I had with word problems in school. Not every problem applied to every word problem.
"This is way too vague."
"Why would someone buy 35 apples and 23 oranges?"
"Why would the person in the problem want to try to figure this problem out? It's completely unrelated to what they were doing."
I get the point was for us to be able to convert information given in a text format into something we can actually solve, but the word problems were usually situations you'd never realistically find yourself in in real life.
I think 2 and 3 are the same problem.
No, 2 is more "why are they buying this many", and 3 is more "why would this person want to figure out some random thing that popped into their head about this".
Okay, concerning 2 I thought you meant, why count and buy exactly this number. But it's actually realistic, for a big family, or for desserts for a party, etc.