Remember “Letters and Numbers” on SBS? (Countdown in UK, Cijfers en Letters in The Netherlands and Belgium, originally Des Chiffres et des Lettres in France).
The core rules for numbers game are: you get 6 numbers, to use with basic operations (add, subtract, multiply, divide) to get as close as possible to a three digit target number. You can only use each number once, but you don’t have to use all numbers. No intermediate result is allowed to be be negative or contain a fraction. Positive integers only, all the way.
Now try this for practice:
Your 6 numbers (4 small, 2 large): 1 9 6 9 25 75
Your target: 316
We’re not worrying about a time limit, as it’s about the problem solving.
If you want, comment on this post with your solution (full working)!
The common answer would be that the the student who wrote the answer below is “clearly wrong”. But are they? Different people think in different ways. For instance, some think in a very literal way. Simply declaring this wrong would be missing the very important point of what’s actually going on.
Students would likely contest that they did exactly what they were asked to do – now unless you choose to think that the kid purely wanted to be a smarty-pants and specifically went out of their way to annoy the teacher (a definite possibility, but not necessarily the case here), this reasoning is entirely valid. I’ll grant you it’s not what the teacher (or the person preparing the sheet) intended, but that’s really not the student’s problem. By making it the student’s problem, you’d just create confusion as they are likely to genuinely not see how what they did was invalid as they literally did what was requested.
The phrasing of questions is often dreadful. In this case it is also ambiguous. To you and I it may be obvious what is intended as the consequences of the alternatives end up being silly, but if you actually stop and think about it, that’s purely by analysis of the options, knowing about conventions, and thus actually using a lot of acquired skill built over the years – which kids don’t yet have fully developed. Even if most kids were to pick the “intended” way, that doesn’t mean that kids who read it differently are wrong.
It’s definitely helpful to assist the student to look at the questions and see which of the possible meanings would make the most sense from the context of the teacher – it’ll help them later in life. But depending on the age of the student, that’s actually a fairly tall ask that will still see many funny “mishaps” along the way. In any case, failing or punishing the child is I think a faulty approach. What do you think? Perhaps you were you one of “those” children yourself? Tell us about it, please!
History and Geography are no longer boring and dry, and the material provides a wide variety of topics.
Laura Davidson, Teacher