People are math challenged

Quote: pacomartin

...they hand you the bills, and then give you the coins so that they all fall on the floor...

THAT drives me frikin NUTS!

I never realized that there was a 'reason' clerks did it that way.

Quote: pacomartin

Now people read the change and they hand you the bills, and then give you the coins so that they all fall on the floor. Of course, even that observation is getting dated.

I hate it when cashiers do that! I often specifically thank them when they give me the coins first, especially if it looks like they are inexperienced, and not set in their ways yet. Coins fit perfectly in the palm of your hand, and as was noted, the alternative is they slip around the paper money, and fall on the floor.

When I was trained as a cashier at Knott's Berry Farm they said to give the coins last, so that the customer to ensure they got the correct change. Perhaps back in 1983 that was a legitimate point, when change was worth something. However, I quickly noticed the problem of the coins falling on the floor, and went against my training and started giving the coins first. Never once did a customer complain about that.

I use credit cards as much as possible to my great surprise [I was once leery of using them much] ... I truly believe a substantial amount of money that used to go bye-bye I am now keeping, money that I used to get short-changed on. I often am half asleep by the time somebody hands me my change when using cash.

I "game the system" with credit cards, largely out of a resentment of the fact that you are forced to use them for renting cars and making room etc reservations.

Quote: tsmith

They explained that you just add up round dollars, then subtract 3 cents for each item, so that four items at 97c would be (4x1)- 12, or 3.88.

I do something similar when calculating percentages. You start with 10% and 1%, then just add them up to what you need. Example: 16% of 52 is 5.2+(.52*6) This is useful when you don't have either a calculator or paper and pencil handy.

About the next generation, a friend of mine handles tech support at a private school and he also teaches a class there. The stories he tells me about his students are frightening. I'll tell you two of them:

1) A student with a failing average came up to my friend and asked him for help in order to pass the class. In my day that meant the teacher would assign some extra work or maybe offer some extra tutoring during recess or a free period. Well, now it means simply "Hey, teacher, I'm failing and I don't want to fail. Can't you just give me a passing grade?"

2) My friend assigned a paper in the history of computers. This is standard and I remember having done that assignment at least three times in high school and college. One student handed in his assignment boasting "This is A+ material." His "paper" consisted of photocopies of an encyclopedia article with his name scrawled on the margin of the first page. He didn't even bother to copy the article (or in this day and age to cut and paste it onto Word).

With the internet available, it's very easy to simply collate information rather than do work on your own. In a way, the world has changed in that intellectual property is very easy to obtain. In the workplace, it is a waste of time to think of solutions that have already been tried and tested elsewhere -- you always draw on the experience of other people to come up with a solution that works for you. So even though the student simply took a bunch of other articles and handed them in as his own work, he simply missed the ingenuous step of making it his own. In today's workplace, the ability to gather work done by others, collate it, analyze it, and present the results as it pertains to your own situation is an invaluable skill.

Research, analytical, communications, and problem solving skills are what the modern workforce requires today. Learning math is a way to think analytically but if students are not being taught to understand the connection between the math and what they will use it for, they will be bored. Conversely, although writing book reports, essays, and papers may be seen as useless skills, the skill of researching and communication is something that most highly skilled workers need today.

Imagine asking this question... If you see a flash of lightning and hear the thunder 5 seconds later, how far away is it?

Quote: NandB

Imagine asking this question... If you see a flash of lightning and hear the thunder 5 seconds later, how far away is it?

I think that's about 5 s times 240 m/s = 1200 ms/s = 1200 m but I may have the speed of sound at sea level wrong.

BTW, it's not just math. Lots of poeple are so ignorant of the mere basics of all science it's hard to believe. Some years back I worked for a cord-blood bank. They had a doctor on staff who taught the sales people the medical part of the pitch. They often had sessions in my work area and I half listened whie I worked. The doc had to explain very basic bodily functions like respiration and heartbeat, things I was taught in elementary school science class. I shudder to think what they thought they knew about cord-blood stem cells.

I remember it as 1km every 3 seconds, but i think its closer to ~340 m/s.

That would put it around 1 mile every 5 seconds

I think the point NandB was trying to make was that the average young person wouldn't even understand the question.

Unfortuneately, the last response is quite true, quite a few people can't grasp the relationship that seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder later is a special relationship. They would wonder why it is so, but have no inclination (curiosity i suppose) to understand it.

Getting past that initial hurdle, the explanation of "Speed of Sound" can become complex involving more than simple rule of thumb math. FWIW, the Speed of Sound is Temperature Dependant, but generally considered to be 331.3 m/sec at 0 degrees C, or 1087 ft/sec at 32 degrees F. It takes 4.85 sec/mi and 3.02 sec/km. So 1 mile (1.6 km) is close enough.