Bad trend here. I do not like it.
And no fewer than three people – Bodil Isaksen, Jocelyn Dagenais, and David Petro – sent me the following problem, created by a French teacher.
And I don’t know. The jist of the problem is that two soccer players are arguing about the perfection of one of their dabs. They consult a universal dabbing rulebook which says that in a perfect dab those triangles above must be right triangles. And it’s all pretty winking, right? It can’t be pseudocontext if it isn’t actually trying to be context in the first place, right? The judges give it a pass.
The commenters win a second straight week.
Instead, the task here is to find mean, median, mode, standard deviation, first quartile, third quartile, the interquartile range, the maximum, the minimum, the variance, etc, etc.
This is may be the worst math problem I’ve seen in my life.
Well well well … score one for Team Commenters.
Were you sleep-running the entire time? Why can’t you remember where you ran to and from?
This is Pseudocontext Saturday, so rather than overstep my jurisdiction I’ll let someone else critique the scaffolds in problem #32.
I invite any commenter to rationalize the constraint that exactly 15 photos must be purchased and we don’t know which of them will be small or large. More often (always?) people begin with the photos they want, or perhaps they work from a total budget. “I can only buy 15 photos and the number of large photos I purchase can vary from zero to fifteen,” said no one ever.
Given that question, the assigned method isn’t a method most human beings would use to find it.
If most human beings were going to find out the cost of five large photos and ten small photos, they’d multiply each kind of photo by its price. Variables aren’t a useful tool.
So the textbook has made the world serve the math when math should serve the world. If the world doesn’t need math’s service, then math should be gracious enough to step out of the way.
I guessed correctly. The first and third choices made too much sense. Always step up to the plate thinking curveball.
The problem here is that the customer has no use for a general equation, but the store owner might–she’s got to deal with people who call in with all kinds of crazy orders and questions. Still, it’s unlikely the store owner would write an equation for just small and large pictures. It’s much more likely that she’d come up with a pricing scenario for unusual picture sizes.
Come on, team. This is your week.
I post the image without its mathematical connection and offer four possibilities for that connection. One of them is the textbook’s. Three of them are decoys. You guess which connection is real.
The judges wager that if you lined up 100 arbitrary human-types and asked them the first question they wonder about this context, no more than two of them would ask about how long the ping pong ball is in air.
The judges get the sense that the author of the problem just needed some projectile – any projectile – for the task of calculating total time in air. The tennis ping pong ball [Thanks, Paul Hartzer. -dm], the number drawn on the ping pong ball, and the prize you win for catching the ping pong ball – those are all unrelated to the mathematical work. That’s pseudocontext.
The judges rule this pseudocontext because, given that awesome square maze, it’s very unlikely that anyone would wonder about the side length of the maze and unlikelier still that anyone would wonder if the side length was rational or irrational. An exhaustive search for a 1,225 ft2 square maze in Dallas, TX, produced no results, exacerbating the judges’ sense that the textbook is exploiting the world for the sake of math. That’s pseudocontext.