stealth job screening

[boxofdelights]

I think I just got, like, a stealth job screening! I have a new student, a teenager, who is not having trouble with the concepts in her trigonometry class at school, but is shaky on the arithmetic she should have learned in elementary school. I help with class work when she asks, but we spend most of our time doing fractions, decimals, long division.

We had been working steadily for a while when she asked, "Susan, what's your favorite game?" I described griddlers, and showed her Two Dots on my phone. A little later she asked, "So how did you get into math?" I told her how the chapter on probability in my 6th grade math textbook had made me realize that I could use math to win games, and once I understood that you had to multiply fractions to calculate the probability of events A AND B, and add and subtract fractions to calculate the probability of A OR B, and convert fractions to decimals to compare two probabilities, well, that was it, I wanted ALL the math.

At the time I thought she just wanted a little break from talking about long division, but looking back, I think she was trying to find out whether I was really a Math Person. At least, if I were hiring a math tutor, those would be two very good screening questions.

Comments

I didn't know how deeply your...

[jesse_the_k]

math fascination went. Did you ever use the probabilities knowledge to gamble on cards?

I checked out Griddlers and I don't have the faintest clue how they work. (Math was one of the things I lost when I got sick.) Luckily, I still have English.

[lunabee34]

How clever!

[silveradept]

As a screener, it worked very well, and I have to tip my hat to the subtlety involved if those were, in fact, intentional screener kinds of questions.