[Maths-Education] Money Counts
Peter Gill
peter.gill@kcl.ac.uk
Fri, 10 Nov 2000 11:28:00 +0000
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
King's College London
Franklin-Wilkins Building
Waterloo Road
Tel: +44 (0)20 7 848 3188 London SE1 8WA
Fax: +44 (0)20 7 848 3182 United Kingdom
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/education