Exam controversy
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=d12afc30-f2e2-41f4-b97c-c8908291bcb7
One of the questions on the grade 11 physics exam was a school shooting scenario. While I applaud the attempt at an interesting problem, I think it may have been going over the top to make it a school shooting scenario. I'm sure loads are people are upset about the violent nature of the question, but at least it's more real and interesting than "Jimmy throws a ball..." Some of those kids may go on to be police, criminal lawyers, etc and a question like that can show them that mathematics can be useful to them. Give students more interesting problems that encourage an open dialogue and some of the fears of mathematics may well just disappear. I'm actually very, very surprised that the question even made it on the exam. A few years ago I proposed a test project to a school which would introduce "real world" math into the classroom, including things like the stock market, gambling, risk management and credit cards. I met a lot of resistence and finally gave up on the whole thing because I would have had to change so many of the problems that the project would have ended up looking exactly like the regular text book questions that I was trying to avoid. They were just not ready to talk about these 'controversial' subjects to high school students. ???
I think a fantastic course idea is to teach the mathematics behind CSI. Imagine how interested you could keep the students if part of the course was to watch TV and build the math/physics problems out of the episode details!
One of the questions on the grade 11 physics exam was a school shooting scenario. While I applaud the attempt at an interesting problem, I think it may have been going over the top to make it a school shooting scenario. I'm sure loads are people are upset about the violent nature of the question, but at least it's more real and interesting than "Jimmy throws a ball..." Some of those kids may go on to be police, criminal lawyers, etc and a question like that can show them that mathematics can be useful to them. Give students more interesting problems that encourage an open dialogue and some of the fears of mathematics may well just disappear. I'm actually very, very surprised that the question even made it on the exam. A few years ago I proposed a test project to a school which would introduce "real world" math into the classroom, including things like the stock market, gambling, risk management and credit cards. I met a lot of resistence and finally gave up on the whole thing because I would have had to change so many of the problems that the project would have ended up looking exactly like the regular text book questions that I was trying to avoid. They were just not ready to talk about these 'controversial' subjects to high school students. ???
I think a fantastic course idea is to teach the mathematics behind CSI. Imagine how interested you could keep the students if part of the course was to watch TV and build the math/physics problems out of the episode details!