Surprising things pupils don't know?

[letsgomaths]

Usually, we adults are surprised when the younger generation do know something we don't expect. But are there any times you have been surprised by a child or teenager being quite unfamiliar with something you thought they would know about, or have had to shift your expectations? Here are some I things I have had to explain unexpectedly, come and share yours!

Pin the tail on the donkey. I used it in a maths question about probability: a pupil had never even heard of it! I didn't get them to play it though.

Also about probability, I've sometimes had to explain playing cards to teenagers who have never used them.

I once had to explain to a teenager what a microscope is used for: it was news to them.

I was going to add the Millennium Bug to this list (it seems like only yesterday everyone was terrified of the impending doom), then I realised most of my pupils hadn't been born then!

I quite enjoy telling pupils about old technology, such as looking things up on microfiche, or TVs that were not flat screen.

Oh yeah and the amount of times my usually very intelligent daughter shows up a gap in her knowledge (to be fair it's hard work trying to constantly be right about everything) is amusing. She was utterly disgusted a while back at the revelation that chips are made from potatoes. Livid at the idea.

Living rurally , I’ve been on trips to the city with kids who’ve barely left their farm/village. They’re pretty independent cooking /shopping wise.

I know this is a lighthearted thread, but the things that have been mentioned have a huge impact on my subject and others.

I teach business and to get in the top band on questions 3 marks plus (GCSE) answers have to be in context of the Business in the question, whilst there is a brief explanation given there are often products/services/Businesses used that if you live outside of a major city, different life chances students are really struggle.

In a recent graphics assessment where students were not allowed internet access there were a lot of them not knowing what vinyl records were so lost a lot of time trying to figure it out.

This also impacts L3 i.e. a recent marketing exam was about folding bikes - I teach in an area that has no one commuting to the extent that a folding bike to take into the office made sense to them (luckily for that one it was on a pre-release so I was able to explain)

One that startled me was 5yo ds asking what a sign meant - a no smoking image. He didn't understand what I meant by 'smoking' and thought that obviously you wouldn't want a bonfire in a waiting room. Turned out he didn't know the word 'cigarette' because he doesn't know any adults who smoke (the few who do don't do it near children and hide in a garden), so I had to try to explain.
'Oh, those smoke tubes!'

Used to take inner city kids camping and my eating a blackberry from a hedge shocked them. They thought all wild berries were poisonous and all edible ones were grown on farms.

My dd thought Queenie was married to Prince Charles and Philip was her father - we're not big royalists to be fair. She can tell the time and won't leave the house without her watch.

DD1 aged 5 asked why did that man have a smoking stick, and I realised she'd never heard the word "cigarette" before. I was pretty smug .

I once did a quiz for my year sixes and included a picture round. I had Boris as one of the pictures and 3 out of 4 teams thought it was Jimmy Saville!

However same DD thought that Sweden was the capital of Denmark, and asked seriously (aged 14) where Orientah was, she knew what The Orient was/had been, but didn't know about Orientah. Turns out she thought the carol started "We three kings of Orientah", and had never bothered about whether the verse made sense "as they never do, really".

I'm in Year 5 at the moment, and a few of the children didn't know how many weeks in a month. Or minutes in an hour... or hours in the day...

@jackparlabane Perhaps children not knowing what "smoking" means is a good thing; may it become a quaint relic of the past!

And as for collecting blackberries: to be fair, somebody might have taught them that many wild berries and mushrooms are indeed poisonous, and left it at that. Some children have to be taught not to lick everything in sight!

My colleague in her 40 's was shocked that there is alcohol in liqueur chocolates.

I teach Functional Maths in FE and some learners struggle with the contexts of the questions, understandably in some cases. (If you have never paid utility bills you may not know what paying quarterly means, for example.). One of my practice questions involves working out how many eggs someone can expect to get from six chickens in a week. To start this, you have to work out how many hours there are in a week. Most people sensibly do 24x7, but one lad did 24x5. I asked him why - he replied “Weekends?”

@borntobequiet I can imagine the arguments with that question. Do chickens lay eggs in the night as well as the day? I remember this question when I was in year 9:

A fly sits on the edge of a 30cm diameter record. If it remains there while one side of the record is being played, and there are 1180 grooves across the diameter, find out how far the fly travels.

Apart from not many pupils nowadays knowing what records are ("like CDs, but big and black" I read once on MN), I would have argued that we only need to count half of the 1180 grooves: the arm of the record player only has to cross the radius, not the diameter. I think I kept my mouth shut that time, but I could have imagined a whole lesson being devoted to arguments about it!

I do sometimes wonder about the sanity of examiners. We had another question about fish farms that made someone remark that he hadn’t had a worse experience since driving a tank in Afghanistan.

Off topic but what the fuck is white dog poo?

letsgomaths

But there is only one grove on the side of a record.

I agree. There is only one groove.

thatmust white dog poo is canine excrement that really is white in colour (not excrement from canines with white coats)

Fairly common in the 1960s - haven't seen any for years - presumably the colour came from what the dog was fed.

'One of my practice questions involves working out how many eggs someone can expect to get from six chickens in a week. To start this, you have to work out how many hours there are in a week. Most people sensibly do 24x7, but one lad did 24x5. I asked him why - he replied “Weekends?”

I love the idea of hens having a contract where they don't lay eggs at weekends!

My colleague in her 40 's was shocked that there is alcohol in liqueur chocolates.

So was my dh - he shared them out to a bunch of six year olds we had around on a play date!

I remember a maths problem at school where we had to calculate the volume of a swimming pool. It gave the dimensions including the sloping bottom. A friend of mine was shocked that this is how pools have a deep end and a shallow end. She thought the water just somehow sloped!

In "the old days" dogs ate a lot of bones hence the white poo (calcium?) Nowadays they have fancy streak etc so it's more brown.

Learned that fron MN (although never seen white poo) so hope it's true!

Weirdly when ive been to LEDCountries i dont really notice white poo even if there are lots of wild dogs.

I have to admit there was a lot about pregnancy i didnt know until DC. Blissful ignorance!

Thetruth and others - re the white dog poo...my dog has a bone to chew on most days (saves my cushions) and she does white poo. It's really easy to see when I'm clearing up the garden, and not nearly as revolting as the brown stuff.

“No year seven, Game Boys were not invented by the Victorians”

I'm always surprised that so many children don't understand that no means no.
That school work isn't optional and that it's not appropriate to argue the toss with adults.
Bugger tying shoelaces!