Could you be a Primary School Matematics Teacher?

Here are four questions from a test comprising "27 straightforward maths questions" which were presented to 155 ­primary school teachers for the Channel 4 documentary series Dispatches. The number in brackets at the end of each question is the percentage of the tested teachers who answered the question correctly.

Q1: The mean height of a group of four people is 2m. One more person joins the group and then the mean height is 1·9m. What is the height of the new person? (14)

Q2: ABCDE is a pentagon. Name all its diagonals. (25)

Q3: Assume 5 miles = 8 km. If I travel at 40mph, how long will I take to cover 32km? (32)

Q4: 112 x 22 = 2,464. What is the value of 1.12 x 2.2? (54)

See here for the story in the Guardian complete with the answers and here for the Despatches web page on the topic. Note that the second episode will be shown tonight at 8.00 pm.

The source for this entry is the redoutable Frank Chalk.

Mathematical Aspirations

The government wants us to value science because "… it creates thousands of jobs that keep Britain at the leading edge."* To help to promote the importance of science it has created a website. It uses some examples of how science can help us do things. Which example do they use to illustrate how mathematics "is the key to our prosperity"? This one.

* Clearly, not at the leading edge of grammar.

Square Root Day

I have been reminded that today is one of those days when you can do mathematics with the date. In this particular instance the day and the month are the same and when multiplied together they make the year. Well, only if we consider the last two digits of the year. To be specific if we write today's date as 03/03/09 then we can see that 3 x 3 = 9. There are only nine dates that exhibit this property each century so enjoy square root day while it lasts, it's another seven years until the next one.