Posted on 08/18/2010 11:35:28 AM PDT by God'sgrrl
A group of middle school students gather around a dining room table after a day of school work discussing the question, “How many integers between 500 and 1000 contain both the digits 3 and 4?” While some are busily writing out notes on scratch paper and consulting their TI-84 graphing calculators, one student picks up a marker on to a white board propped in the corner. “Here, let me show you …..,” he says. more
The article needs paragraphs.
MMM...
Start your own foundation and don’t let P-S-ers play? You could do it on line and do it nationwide.
[p-s-ers = public schoolers]
Wasn’t a rash decision? If they were really worried about teams of “false flag homeschoolers” it wouldn’t have been that hard to take of the alleged problem, which couldn’t be large in any event.
WHAT ISN’T RAISED AT ALL, however, is that the magnet school teams are exactly the problem complained of on steroids. The magnets cherry pick the very best students from over an enormous population (magnets are an urban phenomenon), and then field their teams of “ringers”. Why aren’t they demanding that the magnet students not be allowed to compete as teams? We know the answer, and only the terminally naive think that the decision was driven by anything other than government school bias.
This is too bad. Three of my kids (all home schooled) have participated in Mathcounts and it’s an incredible program. It really turned my second son onto math and he went on to get an engineering degree. Both of my boys who have graduated got almost perfect math SAT scores and I credit Mathcounts for that. The problems these middle schoolers do in Mathcounts are harder than the problems on the college SAT. I really hope that this can be worked out.
This is too bad. Three of my kids (all home schooled) have participated in Mathcounts and it’s an incredible program. It really turned my second son onto math and he went on to get an engineering degree. Both of my boys who have graduated got almost perfect math SAT scores and I credit Mathcounts for that. The problems these middle schoolers do in Mathcounts are harder than the problems on the college SAT. I really hope that this can be worked out.
I think the real problem here is confusion between individual and group accomplishment. And in many respects, this has to do less with mathematics itself, then the corporate purposes of mathematics.
For example, if you rate mathematicians from best to above average as ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’, the ‘A’s will mostly be used for pure science and innovation. This is the smallest department in most corporations, and feeds into research and development, where teams will try to turn theory into technology. Thus there is very little need for ‘A’s, who all work as individuals.
A typical R&D team will be mostly ‘B’s and some ‘C’s. These are working on “next years model”, with mostly existing tech, and some innovations. So they need to be a little sharper than typical, to spot problems.
The production level team has some ‘B’s, but is mostly ‘C’s, as their job is to insure process quality and accuracy, as well as to do the troubleshooting math.
This is why, in a corporate sponsored event, the emphasis will be on “typical teams”, not “extraordinary teams”, and not individuals. Most of the mathematicians they want to hire will be working on typical teams.
I went to an art magnet school. I took the required one semester of art in high school and that was literally it as far as art was concerned for me. Never touched it after that.
Should’ve gone to a math school but I didn’t score well enough. Too bad
Appreciate the Freep support. :-)
Um, so, what is the answer?
Three-digit numbers with both a 3 and 4, but the first digit has to be 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. That means the last two digits have to be 34 or 43. So that's ten integers.
Now, had it been "more than 100", then it would've been interesting...
180 I think.
It’s going to be a hard problem to solve by counting fingers — count me out.
Well, no, the integers have to contain the digits 3 and 4 ---rather than 3 or 4. :-)
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