Let me summarize. You are wrong. I’m not saying that managers don’t need people skills, but there is a lot of quantitative decisions. If you are buying a bus, you have to balance the maintenance cost versus buying a new bus. You figure out if you are adding routes or deleting them. There are a lot of numerical decisions that have to be made. Maybe she was a great people person and she delegated all those decisions, but somebody was making the decisions.
I’m frankly skeptical of your claim that you were a satisfactory machinist. Were you working on an assembly line? The machinists working in the machine shop for the engineering department were not exactly math shy. Their job was a lot more complicated than running a drill press or a lathe. Of course, there is a similar hierarchy in electricians. My father was a master electrician. He did a lot of algebra for his job. He would call the electricians that just did their job by rote as ‘wire twisters’. A master electrician would have to sign off on their work.
Maybe, but most of those numerical decisions involve basic arithmetic, and maybe compounding interest. Being “shitty at math” doesn’t really mean someone is completely innumerate. The math you need to deal with most basic financial decisions are a pretty small part of whats on FCAT like tests.
Give me a machine shop and a blueprint, and I can make it. I did not say that I was math shy, I am crappy at math but I can do it. I am just not into bullcrap like the whole theorum crap for geometry. Give me a compas, a straight edge, and I can draw any damn thing you need, but dont ask me why if I tweak this this way and sketch that the other way I end up with a funktastic diagram with little arcs and arrows and that crap. [actually a lot of old machinists can draw and interpret the blueprints, but mainly because they worked in the shops since they were 14-15-16 years old and learned to do it on the job, not in some fancy class - though I did have 3 semesters of blueprint reading, drawing and production way back in the dark ages.]
To me this crap is all common sense, just don’t ask me to try and explain any of it unless you put a piece of paper and tools in front of me and I can just draw something and point at it. I am the dumb schmuck that when some guy runs around in a towel dripping screaming Hot Damn!!11! I wonder why he thinks that something you can look at and see any day is something wonderful and miraculous. I’ll just wander back to the shop and produce another test bench for the Chlorine Institute … [though since this time of year was alway the dead time, production wise, I used to rebuild car engines in the shop with the other guys. I really miss my old shops =(]
Hell, I might as well spoiler this. You correctly counted 40 palmettos per benchmark square, butyou overestimated the number of benchmark squares. The “panhandle” portion of the park is slightly more than four benchmark squares; the lower portion is about double the size of the panhandle; and the raggedy bottom of the park adds a bit less than one more. So approx. 14 * 40 = [closer to 650 than any of the other answers].
A-ha! The test, that particular test, is not designed to assess intelligence. It was designed to assess student mastery of the Sunshine State Standards (to which I would link, but that test is 5 years old and the State of Florida has adopted new, slightly more rigorous standards beginning in 2007, so any link I would provide to you would be the wrong standards for this test). The Sunshine State Standards (now the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards) are a list of benchmarks: skills in each content area that students should be able to master by the time they complete the course. There is no mathematics beyond basic Geometry even on the NGSSS FCAT. Any tenth grader who took Algebra and Geometry in Florida public schools should be able to pass that exam. As many of you pointed out, it’s not that difficult. But asserting that this test assesses intelligence in some way is suggesting the wrong tool is being used for the job. If you want to assess intelligence, you administer a Wechsler or Stanford-Binet IQ test. Any education administrator should know that.
Full Disclosure: I work for the contractor who is paid by the State of Florida to develop the test. In fact, I was on the team that produced the Sample Test Materials, which some of you may have already discovered on the FCAT web site.
Any questions for me? (And I’m already sorry I asked.)
His suggestion is born of ignorance. :: heavy sigh ::
Again, he should know this, but for the rest of you…
The Sunshine State Standards were not created in a vacuum by little green elves. They were created by committees of Florida TEACHERS who are actually, you know, teaching material in real live classrooms, every single day in Florida. The FL DOE Curriculum department meets with these committees, examines the curriculum, and set the standards. The standards are available for public review – posted on the web for ANYONE to examine, anytime – for at least a year before they are adopted by the State Board of Education.
FCAT assesses student achievement of the standards. It appears this particular administrator actually takes issue with the standards, but it’s likely that some of his own teachers participated on committees to design those standards based on what is actually happening in their classrooms. He could have fired off e-mails about the rigor of those standards for a year before the state actually adopted them. He could have turned up at DOE in Tallahassee and set up meetings with the people who are responsible for the test. He could have done a lot of things. Instead, he’s coming up with pie-in-the-sky suggestions that are not grounded in psychometric theory, nor are they based on any kind of large-scale assessment theory. He has no idea how this test, or its questions, are even developed. I doubt he’s set foot inside a public school classroom since his own high school graduation.
Yeah, I figured it out. To me that’s not a math problem… it’s really more of a spacial awareness kind of thing. No scientist, engineer, or mathematician would display the data that way. If you had a real map and needed to do that you would actually attempt to measure the area in some way, or at least cut out an overlay or something.
Meh, I’m just bitter because I didn’t get them all right.
Not necessarily. When I took the American Chemical Society final exam for organic chemistry there were two students out of 20 in my class who scored worse than random. The professor said the test was famous for that, and that the possible answers on the multiple choice questions were selected to mislead by offering extremely plausible but incorrect options.
We aren’t talking about figuring 15% on a restaurant check. Figuring out whether to replace a bus or keep maintaining the existing bus isn’t simple arithmetic. You need to amortize the new bus versus maintenance on the old bus. In a big organization I need to figure out if I need more mechanics if I have a lot of old buses. I actually learned something about making those kind of decisions when I was taking accounting. Shucks, when I took the defense inventory management training class we spent quite of bit of time discussing whether to replace track shoes versus replacing the whole track on tanks. Apparently that decision worked out to millions of dollars a year in maintenance costs, but you have to balance it against readiness.
Actually this is a quite a practical example in Florida. When you are trying to figure out how many pallets you need to order when you resod your yard. Instead of palmetto trees you need the number of square yards of sod per pallet.
You need to look at the exam. It is all applied mathematics. There is none of the theorem proving in it. Most of the stuff is as practical as what a surveyor does. My dad didn’t need to understand Ohm law, but he needed to apply it every day.
Sure you do. But that doesn’t pertain to what I’m saying. The problem with the graph as a representation of the data is that:
-The symbols within the sample were placed semirandomly (as trees really would be). This placement served no clear purpose, especially because of the next item:
-Each symbol, instead of representing 1 tree or 10 trees, represented 4 trees, a weird number. If the symbols were where actual trees occurred (accounting for their weird placement), they should have represented 1 tree each. If they were going to represent some number besides 1, they should have been arranged in neat rows–and probably should have represented 10 trees each, since there were 40 trees total.
-The lengths of the sides of the sample area weren’t described.
-The area of the total polygon wasn’t described.
For your yard, you might get something saying, “Each pallet has 100 [or whatever] square meters.” You’d then go measure your yard.
The problem’s graphic was deliberately obfuscated.
When I did it for my yard, I didn’t measure the yard. I took the plat map to figure the area of the front yard and then subtracted out the area for the driveway and the sidewalk. Measuring the yard directly when the longest tape I have is 25 feet would have been a pain.
If I was doing this with pencil and paper I only need to tell if the 650 or 1000 answers are correct, so I can ignore the curved edges. I would mark the length of the square on the side of a piece of paper and measure the length and height of the two sections. It would be easy to tell if the park was closer to 14 squares or 25.
Yeah, and he seemed to hate all of his teachers. I really resent this quote everytime I see it. It’s not fair. Someone has to teach kids. We’re not all idiots.
