pseudo maths
“So how much money do I need to give her when we get to the campsite?”
My daughter asked this the other day because her and her friend are off camping for 3 nights, after finishing their exams. As I thought through the situation I thought too about the edexcel-maths-paper-pseudo-context-overdose that was in the news.
I’d paid $3600 for the 2 of them to camp for 3 nights, and her friend’s mum had paid $5200 for the train tickets. I’d paid a 40% deposit for the camping already. So it was quite a good question- when they get to the campsite and have to pay the remaining amount, how should they sort out the cash so they’ve both paid the same amount. (Of course they both would pay the same amount - nothing, but that’s for bonus marks).
I do get the idea of making the questions real-life, but as dan meyer tweeted, the GCSEs seem to be sitting on a huge stockpile of pseudocontext, and the kids’ reactions seemed to me less about the difficulty and more about the rather laughable randomness of the situations dreamed up for a maths question to go into. Can’t a maths question just be a nice maths question? If not, there are real life situations that teenage kids might actually find themselves in that can be used.
