41–50 of 100 posts
Assume some of the sheep didn't make it through a winter or that one of the dogs attacked some of them and had to be put down. So, 125 sheep left from a potential of 144 after 12 years of shepherding seems possible.
Assuming the shepherd lives in a country that still has shepherding as a profession, we'll assume s/he started at 15.
The shepherd is 27 years old
Q.E.F.
I also think that because they don't expect a teacher to lie they tell themselves there has to be a answer.
Especially with younger kids, when they are asked a question by someone with authority, there is a reasonable presumption that it can be answered. I'm all for teaching them to challenge that presumption, but I think you'd get a more fair result if the question was, "Can you figure out the age of the shepherd if you know how many dogs and sheep he has in his flock?"
Teachers are much more assertive when you admit that you don't know, rather than being trying to prove your worth everytime.
Of course, this kind of maturity is hard for little kids, specially when the "differences in power" between the kid and the teacher are the biggest.
This 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…
Okay, hand me a tape measure.
In a middle school algebra class we had a word problem on a test that had us divide by the number of cards in a deck of cards. I didn't think this was a fair question, because it assumed that everyone knew how many cards were in a deck of cards. I went to the teacher's desk and whispered this concern to her and she said "Come on, even my 5 year old knows how many cards are in a deck of cards."
Not 10 minutes later, another student raised his hand and asked how many cards were in a deck of cards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would never happen if there was a laptop in every classroom. Yes, the superior abstract reasoning that the computer imparts would definitely solve this! (I'm also fairly skeptical of this finding). From the article: The “How Old Is the Shepherd?” question was popularized by an essay written by Professor Katherine K. Merseth in 1993 and was based on research by Professor Kurt Reusser in a paper presented at the 1…
Part of the problem with this question is that many students today don't know what a "shepherd" is. Perhaps this is also a failure of education, but it isn't a failure of math education. It would be better to say a "farmer" owns these animals, since most children would have heard the word "farmer" at some point in their lives. Or maybe it would be better to say "your neighbor" has so many cats and so many dogs but th…
What a shepherd is is completely irrelevant [1] to the problem.
> Perhaps this is also a failure of education, but it isn't a failure of math education.
The inability to identify which things in a word problem are relevant to the question being asked is clearly a failure in education in the area of logic and reasoning, if not specifically in "math" per se.
[1] Well, unless "shepherd" is some thing that has ownership of a number of dogs and/or sheep that has a fixed mathematical relationship to its age, but I doubt any child's lack of experience with the term would leave them with a prior expectation that that was the case.
Let's assume the shepherd graduated high school at 18 then bought 2 lambs and a farm. He was nice to his sheep so didn't breed them until 2 years and not after 7. The average litter size is 2 and the average age is 11. Let's assume an even number of male and female sheep. At year 2 he'll have 4 sheep (2 original and 2 new lambs). 2 more at year 3 and then 4 at year 3 (the first litter can now breed). At year 7 the or…
These 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…
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 to his father. How can you assume that he started at 18. In Arabia some kids become Shepards at the age of 13.
Your example was just plain stupid and so is your assumption that they have bad math skills.
These 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 was greatly concerned for a second there, before realising I was confusing Fermi Paradox[1] with Fermi Problem[2].
Unless there's something the sheep are keeping very well hidden...
Especially with younger kids, when they are asked a question by someone with authority, there is a reasonable presumption that it can be answered. I'm all for teaching them to challenge that presumption, but I think you'd get a more fair result if the question was, "Can you figure out the age of the shepherd if you know how many dogs and sheep he has in his flock?"
Given the environment, why wouldn't the children guess? For years, we give them homework and tests where a guess is always equal to or better than no answer at all. But that's nearly the opposite of how the world works, so we're clearly teaching them the wrong things. I don't see how revealing that is not "fair".
Math in USA is taught like religion, you have to believe what you are told, and god save you if you ask for proof. I remember in School we were reviewing Pythagoras Theorem. I asked the teacher to explain why it worked. She proceeded to draw on paper a triangle with sides of 3 and 4 inches, and then measured the long side, and said ‘see,’ with a very proud tone in her voice. When I asked if there is any more definitive proof, she replied that “it’s a theorem, there is no proof, that’s just the way it is.”
I spent the first 6 grades of my education in Ukraine, admittedly in the communist equivalent of prep schools. There we were given math problems, and we were expected to solve them OR prove that they were unsolvable. At least one problem on every test was unsolvable, and they actually expected you to provide proof. My experience with college level math on US was the same, the teachers were smart and taught well. But Middle School and High School level math in USA is pathetic, in my experience.