Would You Rather?
On the third day of school I presented my class of 9th graders the problem shown above -- it came from a great website called "Would you Rather?" that presents many problems in the form of choices. My intent was to use this problem in order to teach them the format for recording their work and thinking that I will be asking them to follow in class this year.
The format itself is pretty simple; it consists of three main sections: a summary of the problem, a numbered table which shows "work" on one side and "thoughts" on the other, and a section where they work the problem in "another way".
We discussed the problem, whole-class, and my students in each class decided to convert from hourly to yearly in order to compare the two job offers. They all decided that step one was to figure out how much you make in a week and most every student determined that the math needed to accomplish that was to multiply $15/hr by 40 hours/wk. I was pleased as they all recorded the operation "$15 x 40 = $600" under work #1 and "This will tell me how much I make in one week." under thoughts #1.
Then, I asked them if I could answer the question & they all told me "no", that we couldn't compare $600 and $30,000 because it wasn't the same unit. They told me we needed to figure out how much we'd make in a whole year.
The next part of the whole-class discussion is what surprised me: the hang-up, the real problem in this problem-solving exercise, was my students didn't know how many weeks are in a year.
I did have one student who tried to figure it out: he knew that there were 12 months in a year and he said there were 4 weeks in each month so he calculated that there were 48 months on a year. I gave him props for trying but reminded him that some months had more than four weeks and then just stated the answer (our in-class technology wasn't working yet so there was no opportunity for them to research the answer themselves). We solved the remainder of the problem successfully after that and went on to work it "another way" as well.
So, dear readers, here is my question to you: are you as surprised as I am? Am I "out of touch" that I expect, in a group of about 40 15-year-olds in high school, that they should know that there are 52 weeks in a year? As always, I'd love to hear from you.
The Solver Blog
Author: Dr. Diana S. Perdue