“I just don’t think you can ask a student to endure twelve years of frustrating math instruction now with the promise of a job making $70k as an architect later. It isn’t just kids who are lousy at delaying gratification like this, it’s everybody. And you’re asking them to do more than delay gratification. You’re asking them to delay gratification and embrace something they dislike.
Our students are living in the real world right now. There is nothing more real to a student than right now. Their friends, their enemies, their greatest loves and biggest heartbreaks, their passions, their hopes and their dreams are wrapped up in a few buildings, a quad area, and a blacktop. Saying this isn’t “the real world” diminishes everything there is about a student. Stop preparing kids for the real world and prepare them for right now.”
A Fix: Get each pupil to ask five adults what grade they got at GCSE Mathematics and how much they earn (using pre-defined cateogies in class). Pool all results together and pupils can see first hand the corrolation between doing well in maths and earnings. Further, they are actually doing maths for ‘real’, whilst seeing the point of the below – as well as leading nicely on to mean of continuous data, histograms and frequency polygons. Nice!