My fifth grade math students are preparing for the state math test. They were taking a practice test in the classroom yesterday when a generational glitch came up. The question was about how someone had taken some pictures on a roll of film and only 9 of them developed because the flash was not working. If the roll cost (some amount), how much did each picture cost.
I looked at the problem and thought - great that is an easy division problem. This is one question students are not going to have a problem with.
Wrong. No one in my class knew what the phrase "developing a roll of film" meant. No idea what so over! What's a roll of film? It gets developed? What does that mean?
Too bad the test writers couldn't come up with a better question like if someone downloaded 9 MP3's from a website, and it cost some amount, how much did each song cost? Now that would have been a question the students could answer. Or printing digital pictures.
I think this is supposed to be a math test, not a generational vocabulary test!
1 comment:
What I think is crazy is that this year's group of 5th graders was really too young to remember September 11th! When the date came up, I mentioned something about it, and only like 2 kids knew what I was talking about! It wasn't even that long ago, but already there's a generational gap. Crazy!!!!
Post a Comment