On February 18, 2014 at 21:58, Fins said...
Ernie, the question was
Round the following numbers to the nearest hundred:
346 _____ 14 ______
The debate is over 14. If you need more information to comprehend this question, I'll see if I can have the special ed teacher contact you.
Getting math right requires being very specific about how it's written. It did not take a special ed teacher to tell me that the problem you posed,
Round the following numbers to the nearest hundred:
14
could not possibly have been the problem. You didn't notice that you wrote number
s and then supplied only one number? How the hell does one answer an obviously impossible question?
Then you wrote
There were two numbers to the problem. The first was 346. She rounded that to 300. Then the other one is 14. So how would you round it to the nearest 100?
But this is freakin' MATH and exactly how it's written matters a lot. You chide me for not getting it, but what you wrote was unclear enough that Mario claimed it was not about rounding off but about estimating. And he's pretty sharp.
Hell, a good math teacher would have written the problem (it's not a question, it's a problem) as
Round the following numbers to the nearest hundred:
346 _____
14 ______
or even better
Round the following numbers to the nearest hundred:
1. 346 _____
2. 14 ______
We deal here every day with people who have trouble solving problems with A/V gear, such as the recent request for a device to convert optical to CAT5. Well, you can't. Light does not convert to electricity and plastic does not convert to copper. The actual problem is "What device can convert an optical digital signal to a balanced wired digital signal?" Stating it clearly and completely points to the answer, which is to look into how the signals are sent, and convert their transmission method from one style to another.
You kid's math teacher is either mean or is too ignorant to realize that the problem as posed has too few parts to help point toward the answer. The teacher should have given another one or two examples to get the mind into the groove of rounding off before tossing in the grenade. That teacher did not use the problem to teach, but to eliminate!
