I believe many people have encountered such a math problem in math class:
There are a number of chickens and a number of rabbits in the cage, there are 15 heads from the top and 94 feet from the bottom, how many chickens and rabbits are in the cage?
This is the classic eternal chicken-rabbit cage problem, which makes generations of middle school students scratch their ears and cheeks.
It was a commonplace math problem, but it caused controversy because of a Tsinghua professor's words.
Wang Wenzhan, a professor at Tsinghua University and former director of the Department of Basic Education of the Ministry of Education, said at a conference that we really need to let students spend a lot of time practicing Xi problems that are out of touch with real life
Why did Wang Wenzhan make such remarks?According to Professor Wang, he has lived to be 86 years old and has never seen a farmer keep chickens and rabbits in the same cage
Many students spend a lot of time Xi these unrealistic problems every day, and many Olympiad questions just blindly embarrass students, without considering whether students really understand Olympiad.
As soon as Professor Wang's remarks came out, it caused heated controversy among netizens. A large number of netizens said that many math problems could not be understood at all: I have never seen a pool that fills water while releasing water. In his rhetoric, he did disagree with the fact that some math problems were out of touch with reality.
Some people also pointed out that Professor Wang's remarks were not up to the standard of Professor Tsinghua University, and chickens and rabbits would be kept in the same cage when they were sold in the market, and chickens and rabbits would be fed in the same cage in some places due to limited space. Just because I haven't seen it doesn't mean I haven't, Professor Wang is still not down-to-earth enough.
In fact, the problem of chickens and rabbits in the same cage has been passed down from ancient times to the present, and it is still enduring after hundreds of thousands of years of testing, which shows its charm in mathematics teaching.
The chicken-rabbit cage problem is an enlightening problem for binary equations, which is a fairly intuitive and down-to-earth example for students, aiming to cultivate students' mathematical thinking, and there is no so-called detachment from reality.
Many mathematics topics and theories are highly abstract in themselves, and it is very necessary to build students' mathematical thinking models by taking common things as examples, which are more understandable and simple.
If you pay attention to practicality, except for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, most of the problems learned in mathematics cannot be directly used to solve practical problems. We learn Xi mathematics, and the focus is on solving the difficulties encountered in life with mathematical thinking, which is a universal ability.
Of course, Professor Wang Wenzhan's intentions are good, and the examples are not very appropriate, but it is also true that there is a disconnect between education and real life.
Some schools and parents one-sidedly pursue improving children's problem-solving ability, and train children with deviant and strange problems for a long time, which not only makes children tired, but also distorts the meaning of education, so that children only swallow jujube for knowledge, eat it but do not digest it.
A good education should give children enough time to think, slow down moderately, stop and walk, so that they can appreciate the beauty of knowledge and become a healthy, independent, complete person with both conduct and knowledge.