[Maths-Education] Money Counts

[Peter Gill]

May I bring up a different, partly technical, issue? The mathematics and
problem solving styles used in finance/accountancy are rather different to
the sort of thing we do up to GCSE, e.g. as far as I can tell fractions are
not used at all (everything is turned into decimals). On the other hand who
uses non decimal fractions in real life anyway?

I know this as a maths educator married to a tax accountant. On one of the
occasions that we came close to divorce we were arguing whether to pay tax
on the stake when backing a horse or to pay it on the winnings. We produced
opposite conclusions from what turned out to be completely valid but very
different mathematical arguments.

At that time I was teaching at a school close by Newbury Racecourse and I
found that betting on horses was seen by my pupils as a perfectly normal
thing to do and gave me an excellent context for teaching probablitiy but
try as i might i could not get them into discussion of the pros and cons of
gambling. It was seen as the local industry and thus a Good Thing.

Peter Gill                    School of Education
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