I just asked my 2 yr old this same question. He just responded with "yellow!" /facepalm
Like the AT&T commercial guy would say, "That's adorable."
How Old Is The Shepherd?
61–70 of 100 posts
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#62I thint there is an unfortunate temptation to look at the students and think "how stupid are they?", but I wonder if the issue is more about familiarity of tasks. If students are going along solving word problems that always make sense, they have zero practice in identifying which questions are well posed and which aren't. It may not be that they're bad at reasoning through word problems, so much as they aren't used…
I think perhaps a better setup to the problem for a child might be to make a question that is possible to answer, but has extraneous information. Something like: "There are 12 children, 3 bats, 15 balls, and 2 swings. If everyone is holding a ball, how many balls are left over?"
Filtering out extraneous information is an important and related skill, but its slightly different thing than identifying when the problem as phrased does not have the information needed to support an answer.
While it may be the case that the education system fails to do enough at both of these, I suspect it does better at getting students to identify extraneous information and use only what is necessary than it does to get them to identify and confidently report when a question posed has inadequate information to support an answer.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#63These kids were in something of a no win situation. I'm imagining a different class where 75% of the students said that there wasn't enough information to complete the problem: --- Our younger generation is doomed because they clearly don't understand math. After all, this is a fairly basic Fermi problem. The shepard probably started his own flock at around 18 and with two sheep. A sheep is a large mammal, so I'll as…
I up voted you despite the forgotten 2 dogs who cannot possibly have both survived for 15+ years.
The dogs were probably helping the shepherd, not part of the flock as per the problem statement.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#64These kids were in something of a no win situation. I'm imagining a different class where 75% of the students said that there wasn't enough information to complete the problem: --- Our younger generation is doomed because they clearly don't understand math. After all, this is a fairly basic Fermi problem. The shepard probably started his own flock at around 18 and with two sheep. A sheep is a large mammal, so I'll as…
Is this honestly a joke. How on earth could you expect a student to come up with an answer to a question with no information even slightly relevant to the answer; that is not a basis to judge math skills. Also your above calculation is no better than the ones the grade eights had made. If you had any knowledge of farms you would know that the Shepard probably bought a lot of sheep too and maybe some of them belonged…
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Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#65Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#66These kids were in something of a no win situation. I'm imagining a different class where 75% of the students said that there wasn't enough information to complete the problem: --- Our younger generation is doomed because they clearly don't understand math. After all, this is a fairly basic Fermi problem. The shepard probably started his own flock at around 18 and with two sheep. A sheep is a large mammal, so I'll as…
Actually the correct answer is the shepherd was previously an investment banker who is now going through a mid-life crisis. He's only been a shepherd for 3 weeks and he bought the entire flock as is.
He's 52.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#67These kids were in something of a no win situation. I'm imagining a different class where 75% of the students said that there wasn't enough information to complete the problem: --- Our younger generation is doomed because they clearly don't understand math. After all, this is a fairly basic Fermi problem. The shepard probably started his own flock at around 18 and with two sheep. A sheep is a large mammal, so I'll as…
> However, the fact that they just threw up their hands and declared that the problem is insolvable shows that our school system is failing the next generation of entrepreneurs.
No, that would've been a great outcome in comparison. Instead, they attempted to answer it using only the information provided, showing a complete lack of reasoning skills.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#68This is totally unsurprising. Most word problems in textbooks are poorly written and have little to no basis in reality. My experience as a grade school student is that most teachers get annoyed when you question the logic of the questions being asked. Critical thinking is not rewarded in those situations. So that given, which student is going to stick their neck out in that situation? It's better to risk a wrong ans…
Yes, there are many poorly written problems, but on the other hand, even well-written problems can have little basis in reality. Spherical cows in vacuum, and all that. When a question asks "You throw a ball at 80 km/h at 45 degrees, how far does it travel?" you could argue endlessly about air friction, the exact height of your hand when you let the ball go, Coriolis' force, curvature of the earth, and the fact that…
>* ... but you are not being critical. You're just being obtuse.* //
I disagree. One is being critical.
If however you try to use that as an excuse not to perform the calculation then you're definitely being obstructive.
It is absolutely right for a student performing such calculations to realise there are issues with it not being realistic. They should understand that it's an approximation and understand that even in a perfect, flat, frictionless world it's still an approximation [relativistic mechanics are not being used] but that nonetheless it's a useful model the result produced by Newtonian mechanics is useful.
Indeed I'd say the realisation and ability to express the limitations mark out a student as capable of analytical thought.
>it actually makes it easier for the students to practice and internalize the concept they're learning. //
I fear you're making the calculation the end in itself (we have computers for that!) and not the subject of critical analytical thinking which IMO defines mathematics.
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#69[deleted]
Re: How Old Is The Shepherd?
#70I thint there is an unfortunate temptation to look at the students and think "how stupid are they?", but I wonder if the issue is more about familiarity of tasks. If students are going along solving word problems that always make sense, they have zero practice in identifying which questions are well posed and which aren't. It may not be that they're bad at reasoning through word problems, so much as they aren't used…
Well look, all math problems have a numerical answer. I've been doing them for 8 years so far and every time they've had an answer. These problems are also very silly. But I can confidently state that every math problem has some words and numbers and you are expected to perform some kind of calculation with the numbers based on the words around them.
The problem I see right now doesn't have an immediate connection between the statement and the question parts. I have the numbers 125 and 5 and the question "how old is the shepherd?". I can see that the answer must be a person's age. The numbers refer to how many sheep and how many dogs are in the flock, which isn't really related to the shepherd's age. Still, there's probably some lateral thinking involved, or there's an omission, because I must obviously answer with a number.
If I add, subtract or multiply the two numbers in any order, I do not get a number that is plausible as a person's age. However, if I divide them, I get 25, which is totally a possible answer.
25 is also the number of sheep per dog. Assuming that that's a normal ratio for a flock, we can say that the shepherd's flock contains 5 flock-units. So if the shepherd started at 17 years old (very plausible in a rural setting) and was given a new flock-unit every two years (obviously as you get older you get to take on more responsibility), at age 25 the amount of responsibility would have grown to 5 flock-units.
This answer has a nice symmetry to it. Math answers have some sort of nice symmetry in them, so this sounds plausible. With the information given I can do no better.
Answer: 25 years old.