Thursday, January 29, 2009

Life Moments With A Child On The Spectrum #9

Today Adam had a math worksheet on comparing numbers using percents.

One problem read:
If Jay has $20 and Mitchell has $80, what percent of Mitchell's money does Jay have?

Adam's answer:
Jay doesn't have any of Mitchell's money.

And this is a perfect example of how his literalness interferes with his education.
He had no problem with the other examples.
(What percent of a yard is a foot, If Carlos makes $480 a month and spends $120 a month for rent, what percent of his income does he spend on rent).

Had he put his answer to Jay's money on a test it surely would have been wrong. And his teacher may not have seen the humor in it either.

He can do the work. Heck, he had solved all the math problems in his head correctly before I had finished reading the problem. But only if they couldn't be taken literally.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ugh- that's tough...

I think I have to brush up on my math skills after reading those math problems.

Stimey said...

You know what though? He's totally right. He's going to kill on the logic part of the SATs.