Parent Thinking: Indications that “Educators” Still Don’t Get It

As a parent, have you tried helping your child with a math problem? If so, you might have seen something like this…

“At an appliance store, the regular price of a refrigerator is $700. How much money is saved by purchasing this refrigerator at 30 percent off the regular price rather than buying it at 15 percent off the regular price with an additional discount of 15 percent off?”

I am reminded about the disconnected mindset that some “educators” have when it comes to posing questions for young students to solve. I remember the “bathroom tile”, “farm fencepost” and “bus  fare” questions in the math textbooks that my children had in elementary school. These types of questions demonstrated low emotional intelligence within the context of education and perpetuated the mistake of forcing youth to focus too far in the future instead of the present.

How hard would it have been to just use “a pair of shoes” or “a cell phone” instead of “a refrigerator” so that the student could relate to the problem? Further, the outcome (i.e., determining an answer) is unlikely to provoke any satisfaction so motivation is also absent.

I am also slightly amused by the context of this problem in which one has to discern the savings difference between a single discount versus a pair of discounts. This is one of the biggest tricks going on in marketing – obviously invented by adults for the purpose of deception. Don’t youth get enough exposure to adult idiocy already? Why not give them a mortgage-backed securities problem then?

So, to be fair: not only do “schools kill creativity”, so do today’s educators. They still don’t get it.

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