Besides, even if there was a shepherd, what do you think happens to the sheep anyway? That's right.
I disagree though, the sheep invented the shepherd to give themselves a purpose.
History shows that a strong dictator can keep a population down for an awfully long time with nothing but violence. There's no reason for the dogs to bother inventing anything.
Also your above calculation is no better than the ones the grade eights had made. If you had any knowledge of farms you would know that the Shepard probably bought a lot of sheep too and maybe some of them belonged to his father. How can you assume that he started at 18. In Arabia some kids become Shepards at the age of 13.
Your example was just plain stupid and so is your assumption that they have bad math skills.
The OP link claims a few students tried (for no reason) to divide 125 by 5 and failed to do even that. There is no right answer obviously, it is how you play and tinker with it - the more mathematical tools you have in your toolbox the more you could improvise, see also Credit Default Swaps.
Nerds like to conflate basic competence at technical skills with intelligence. :)
However, while being able to muck about like this doesn't necessarily prove one is smart it at least demonstrates some capacity for learning and exploration. I think that is the gist of the lament - that schools don't play with math, they drill - and agree with its spirit.
We don't need people who fabricate data and make unfounded guesses.
He's 52.
That point remains wrong. You can treat the question as a Fermi problem, but when you do that, it's because you realize and acknowledge that there isn't enough information in the problem to complete it by other means.
I was greatly concerned for a second there, before realising I was confusing Fermi Paradox[1] with Fermi Problem[2].
Unless there's something the sheep are keeping very well hidden...
No, that would've been a great outcome in comparison. Instead, they attempted to answer it using only the information provided, showing a complete lack of reasoning skills.
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Our younger generation is doomed because they clearly don't understand math. After all, this is a fairly basic Fermi problem. The shepard probably started his own flock at around 18 and with two sheep. A sheep is a large mammal, so I'll assume that it has a gestation period around 9 months. We'll also guess that a sheep reaches sexual maturity after 3 years, or four gestation periods. If we assume that all adult female sheep are kept gravid and that genders are divided evenly, we know that the number of female sheep after n gestation periods is
a(n) = a(n-1)+a(n-5)*0.5
Solving the recurrence relation and assuming that both sheep are adults when we start, there will be 60 female sheep, or 120 sheep in total, after 19 gestation periods. Thus the shepherd is around 33.
Of course, I've made several assumptions in my solution and I wouldn't expect eighth graders to come back with the same answer. However, the fact that they just threw up their hands and declared that the problem is insolvable shows that our school system is failing the next generation of entrepreneurs. We don't need people who give up and declare that nothing can be done - we need people who make guesses and take risks. Yes, expecting an eighth grader to solve a recurrence relation is beyond their ability, but they could make simpler approximations. Heck, they could have just divided the number of sheep by two and been right to within an order of magnitude. It works as a model - say a sheep is born every six month and be done with it. It may not be the best model, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. Instead, we've taught our student to be dependent on our teachers to provide them with all the information and not make any guesses on their own.
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Obviously, the above is exaggerated, but the point remains that any answer or non-answer by the students can be interpreted as a lack of math skills and evidence of poor critical thinking.
I'm not going to deny for a moment that our schools do a horrific job of teaching unit analysis - I've taught intro to physics and know how little our high school graduates know. Still, students are caught between two masters. When lacking information, students who guess are punished for lack of critical thinking and those who don't guess are punished for lack of effort and creativity. The blog post obviously indicates that the pendulum is currently swinging toward rewarding creativity over critical thinking. However, the pendulum will swing back and, in twenty years, we'll be complaining about how are students aren't doing nearly as well as the brilliant, creative children this blogger visited.