It Doesn't Have To Be Dull, Surely?

While writing numeracy questions for my GCSE students, which is often an onerous chore, I sometimes get to thinking about how to make things more interesting. Or funny. Or both. It shouldn't be impossible to make practice questions interesting, should it? For that matter, why do exams and examples have to be so humourless in general? Students might do a little better if they weren't locked into quite so grim an examination mindset. Ah, for the good old days which never happened! I don't remember that time when the whole exam wasn't themed on raising dragons in Hyborea...

How can numeracy questions be made more interesting? It's a tough question. The standard and most substantial numeracy question is often about a business and its dry income and outflow, and how it all adds up to a net result. How on Earth could that not be dull as ditchwater? (Note: Must find out why ditchwater is the epitome of dullness. With that much life in it, the results of consumption would be anything but dull!) Well, what if we changed from a business to a person, some kind of unusual person? Or a spacegoing cruise line? Or the president of the United States? What if we looked at the bizarre budget of Count Dracula, Baron Frankenstein, or Sherlock Holmes? What if we had to go through the oddities of conversions in barter cultures, or societies that trade via pigments, odd rocks or the sculptures they make in the backs of their caves?

We can literally do anything while making up practice questions. They don't have to be super-conventional and super-dull, they only need to cover the material that will be presented in the exams. It's early days, but progress is being made, and the beginnings of a portfolio are being put together. It's amazing how even the brightest of students have been stunned by new numeracy papers, and presumably were similarly stunned by their previous analogues. We'll get there in the end, with some examples that lead and some that challenge.

In other affairs, if anyone runs into a camel marked 'Abu Dhabi Or Bust', please contact the Quirky Muffin. The story is long, involved, and connected to the mysterious disappearance of said camel from the audience during a recent performance of 'Ooh, That's Not My Fish', a satirical comedy on the connections between frozen strawberries, maniacs moving into the White House, idiots running Downing Street, and the reasons why triangles are under-represented in nature. The camel is a material witness.

O.