[You read the answer here first]
It seems that an age-old mathematical brain teaser (sometimes known as The Missing Dollar) is doing the rounds again on the internet. It goes like this.
Three friends go out for a meal. The bill comes to £30 so they give the waiter £10 each. The waiter then realises he has made a mistake and that the bill should only have been £25. Not knowing how to divide the extra £5 between three people he decides to give them back just £1 each and keeps the other £2 himself. So the three friends have paid £9 each making £27, and the waiter has kept £2, so what happened to the other £1?
I don't know what the difficulty is. The answer is obvious. PayPal kept it.
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Tuesday 26 April 2016
Tuesday 29 March 2016
Not Seeing Pink
In the news this week, a discussion about teachers’ use of multicolour marking, with a flurry of fractious articles about the madness of systems employing up to six different pens or highlighters, sparked off by the current Secretary of State for Education, the fatuous Nicky Morgan, who in decrying these methods said something sensible just for once.
Some teachers have revealed they are barred from marking in red and must now instead use pink, a much gentler colour supposedly less likely to give children a sense of failure. One teacher said he was required to give feedback by drawing pink boxes which had to contain positive encouragement in green and progressive guidance in pink. Others described so called “deep” or “rainbow” marking systems employing coloured pens and highlighters, in which yellow, pink, green, orange, blue and purple each have a precise function in sustaining a dialogue of feedback and response between marker and learner. If you are sufficiently self-flagellating to want to see the intricacy of one such scheme (or perhaps an ambitious teacher seeking advancement through the micro-management of others’ working practices), you can download this fourteen page document from Thameside with which, one presumes, all teachers in the school must be familiar and fluent.
Well, I am no better qualified than Ms Morgan to pass an opinion on what would seem to be an onerous detraction from the real task in hand, instigated purely to impress OFSTED, but I would like to make one contribution.
I am reminded of a member of the administrative staff in my last job, who helpfully went through lengthy sets of minutes and specification documents highlighting in pink all the points that required my attention. I had no idea at all she was doing this until one day, after around three years, I missed something important.
You see, I can’t see pink highlighting. Not for me the glorious kaleidoscope of autumn colours: the glow of rowan berries in the late evening sun. Red and green look nearly the same. Orange is bright green (or should that be red?). And purple just looks blue.
Apparently, tyrannical technicolour marking prevails over inclusivity.
Some teachers have revealed they are barred from marking in red and must now instead use pink, a much gentler colour supposedly less likely to give children a sense of failure. One teacher said he was required to give feedback by drawing pink boxes which had to contain positive encouragement in green and progressive guidance in pink. Others described so called “deep” or “rainbow” marking systems employing coloured pens and highlighters, in which yellow, pink, green, orange, blue and purple each have a precise function in sustaining a dialogue of feedback and response between marker and learner. If you are sufficiently self-flagellating to want to see the intricacy of one such scheme (or perhaps an ambitious teacher seeking advancement through the micro-management of others’ working practices), you can download this fourteen page document from Thameside with which, one presumes, all teachers in the school must be familiar and fluent.
Well, I am no better qualified than Ms Morgan to pass an opinion on what would seem to be an onerous detraction from the real task in hand, instigated purely to impress OFSTED, but I would like to make one contribution.
I am reminded of a member of the administrative staff in my last job, who helpfully went through lengthy sets of minutes and specification documents highlighting in pink all the points that required my attention. I had no idea at all she was doing this until one day, after around three years, I missed something important.
You see, I can’t see pink highlighting. Not for me the glorious kaleidoscope of autumn colours: the glow of rowan berries in the late evening sun. Red and green look nearly the same. Orange is bright green (or should that be red?). And purple just looks blue.
Apparently, tyrannical technicolour marking prevails over inclusivity.
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