Great Math article!

[jenk]

lol, I can relate to this

John Kelso
Trying the TAKS is an eye-opener
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF


Sunday, June 15, 2003

It's looking like I'm going to get sent back to eighth grade.

I just took the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills math test for
ninth-graders -- and flunked. If I'd answered a measly two more
questions correctly, I would have passed.

But 23 right out of 52 ain't bad. OK, so it's not playing in Albert
Einstein territory. To pass, I would have needed to nail 25. To get a
commended or an outstanding performance rating, I would have needed to
get at least 45 right.

To get 45 right, I would have had to cheat and bribe the principal.

You've seen these annoying bumper stickers around town that say stuff
like, "My son is an honor student at Porter Middle School." I'm
thinking of putting a bumper sticker on my car that says, "I'm too
dumb to get into Porter Middle School."

I got the idea for taking this test the other day when I read in this
newspaper that 43 percent of Central Texas high school sophomores are
in danger of failing the TAKS, the state achievement test required to
graduate. Among 35 Central Texas school districts, nearly 6,500 of
about 15,200 sophomores flunked at least one section of the test.

Adults read about these results, and they think, "Boy, children these
days are a bunch of dim bulbs." And that's not necessarily the case,
because some of these questions are tough.

I'll wager most of y'all couldn't pass this test with a tutor.

OK, Mister Smarty Pants, answer me this one: In the graph of the
function y equals x squared plus 5, which describes the shift in the
vertex of the parabola if, in the function, 5 is changed to minus 2?

The correct answer is D, seven units down. The answer I wanted to give
was, "What the heck's a parabola?" For all I know, a parabola is a
Japanese car. So I got that one wrong.

See, in some ways our kids are smarter than we are, because they're
still learning skills we can't remember how to spell. The problem I
had with this test is that it leaned heavily on algebra and geometry.
What most people two years out of high school could remember about
algebra and geometry they could store in a thimble.

You think I'm kidding? Then figure out this one, which is question No.
25 on the TAKS ninth-grade math test.

Which is always a correct conclusion about the quantities in the
function y equals x plus 4? The correct answer is, the variable y is
always greater than x. Duh. How did I miss that one?

Is this the sort of math question we really want to be asking our
youth? Shouldn't we be posing more practical questions they can use
later in life?

Such as, if Texas is a four-point dog to Oklahoma and Johnny bets
$1,000 on Texas and Oklahoma beats Texas by five and Johnny makes
$12.50 an hour changing oil, how many 40-hour weeks will Johnny have
to work to pay back his Sooner buddy?

That one wasn't on the test, but the answer is two.

Anyway, next time I take this test I'm going to set my sights lower
and start in fifth grade.

[kixot]

1. As a mathematics major, I am appalled.

Amused, but mostly appalled.

[jenk]

2. I understand

I would be too

but it's true

[JVS]

3. Same here

[LWolf]

4. I read this one last month.

I'd just like to see the politicians writing legislations pertaining to the tests pass them. We could leave them behind when they failed.

:evilgrin: