Does anybody at TI check the math?

I get that the images below are not real classrooms. These are combinations of staged and stock photos. I get that. But seriously, a waterfall with a straight-line cross-section? And just what answer do we expect to the “shade 1/6 of the hexagon” task? Is the resolution on that screen good enough to detect the difference between 1/4 and 1/6? And how will the teacher tell that difference at a glance? Do YOU know which of those responses is correct?

Note the right triangle on the NSpire screen. And the "Real-world" connection: "Diagonal distance of a waterfall".

We're filling from the bottom up. If height of hexagon is 1 unit, what fraction SHOULD we fill to? And how exactly do these images help me assess whether students can find it?

Advertisement

One response to “Does anybody at TI check the math?

  1. This is a theme in math blogs at the moment; I suspect it may last a good while longer.
    Such a shame that spectacular technology for connecting text in a math book to the “real” world is wasted with stupid examples. Perhaps a valid use of the text would be to ask students “What do you see wrong here?”? Thanks for sharing – I can use this in my preservice education classes on “ICTs and math education”.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s