Math Tests are Not Recitals

I once heard an advertisement by (I think) the Ad Council. It featured a musical piece with 15% of the notes played wrongly. The narrator said that’s an 85%, pretty good in math.

The key difference is that math students don’t practice one problem over and over again for weeks on end, only to take a test on that exact problem.

To make this a fair comparison, the music student would need to be learning a new instrument or a new piece of music every week. Then at the recital, the teacher would randomly select a unique piece of music for the student to play.

And we wonder why kids thinks their terrible at math of they’re not perfect!