But I don't like cricket
When I was in primary school, one of my teachers once tried to teach us averages using cricket, and it is one of my strongest memories of being thoroughly confused in maths class.
I'm pretty sure my teacher thought that using cricket to teach averages was a great idea, but (for me at least) it was a very bad idea, for three main reasons. First, I didn't actually know the all rules of how cricket was scored. I had played cricket before, but this amounted to hitting when I was supposed to hit, running when I was supposed to run, and trying to catch when I was supposed to catch. I had never actually scored anything or been told how this was done. So all his discussion of average scores was basically meaningless to me. Second, there's this technical detail in cricket batting averages that has to include "not out" somehow, which makes it not like normal averages. He spent most of his lesson discussing this detail and I ended up not knowing what a traditional average was, letalone a cricket average. Third, and most importantly, I didn't like cricket. As an exercise-induced asthmatic, the running wasn't pleasant. As someone with low coordination, I tended to be out pretty quickly as a batter, and so spend a lot of time just sitting on the bench. And as a fielder, well, the chance of actually interacting with the game as a fielder in primary-level cricket is quite low. So the mere mention of cricket turned me off. If cricket is what averages are for, then I really didn't want to know about averages.
And this story embodies the dangers of using "real life applications" to teach maths:
- Students don't know the context: If students ar