A long time ago I started training to be a maths teacher. I didn’t make it, of course, so this isn’t my fault:
A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot – because players couldn’t understand it.
To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.
But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.
Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.
The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.”
It’s easy to laugh at Ms Farrell. Really easy. But while she must carry her share of the blame for her ignorance, so do we as a society when we laugh and move on rather than trying to change things, if not for Ms Farrell then at least for those coming after her.
3 Comments
Agreed. Just think how easy it is to hoodwink people who don’t have a handle on the basic concepts – they are ripe for exploiting by oh, politicians and businesses, for starters.
You’re right – and here’s me testing software. Why am I wasting my time?
Actually the concepts as presented in most educational math problems lack context. It is the math teachers who are to blame for this, sadly. Because if you were to ask most of humanity “what’s one half divided by one third” most of them would answer you “one sixth”, which is wrong. Are they stupid people? I think not. I think the problem is in the math “problems”. They are idiotic presented as such, requiring people to grasp an arbitrary abstraction, not a valuable one.
In the US, the lowest scores for the GRE are those entering the education fields. The second lowest is … wait for it … government service. We’re screwed.