A couple of years ago I made a presentation to geography
teachers about Core Maths. (One motivation
for doing Core Maths is to support the statistical work that A-level geography
students need to do.)
My colleague Scott, head of the geography department has
admitted that he now “does core maths” in real life! When watching Scotland fail to qualify for
the World Cup finals he heard the crowd singing “I’d walk a million miles for one of your goals” . As any self-respecting
Core Mathematician should, he wondered how long it would take to walk a million
miles.
Scott reckoned it would be sensible to walk 30 miles a
day. He then told me it would take 92
years to walk a million miles. What’s
nice is that I can use this with a core maths class. I could give them these figures and ask
whether they are reasonable. Or I could
play them the chant and ask for their thoughts: they might create a different
question. The students could also decide
on their own ‘daily-distance’ to walk.
They might decide that it’s reasonable for people to walk long distances
from the age of, say, 15 up to the age of 65 and could work out how far you
would need to walk each day to cover the million miles. (About 55 miles per day – that feels like a
lot!)
Over at the Quibans website there are lots of ‘Questions
Inspired By A News Story’. They work in
a similar way to this, with some sort of stimulus (usually from a newspaper or
news website) and then some related questions to answer. This is ideal for Core Maths and can be used
to work on problem-solving as well as to practise mathematical skills (such as
percentages) in different contexts.
The tasks on the Quibans site can usually be projected in
class. This question has been set up as
a Quibans and can be found here. Do
explore the rest of the site too.
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