Comics of Literacy (ED402) #hashtag

The following cartoons came from or were inspired by my literacy class. 

It is interesting how the numbers we use in a math class are different from the numbers we encounter in real life. Over the summer, we were working with calculating the sales tax on a jacket that cost $60. In real life, nothing costs $60. The calculation for sales taxes is identical for something that is $59.99 or $60. I wonder if we used more realistic numbers, if students would be terrified by the slightly more complex calculations or it would help them feel more empowered in the real world.

XKCD Original (I cropped to 'keep it rated G')

Also related to literacy is number sense. We spend a lot of time in my placement working to help students develop number sense. It is one of those skills that I take for granted. I had a nice discussion today about what 21/29 was 'close to.' Just at a glance, I could tell that it was between .7 and .75, but some of the students struggled with making that same estimation. I wonder how long it took me to be able to develop the skill to be able at a problems and get a feeling for what a reasonable answer would look like.

Now, just for a bit of math before I go. What does 21/29 actually look like? Well, I started doing the long division to figure out what it was as a repeating decimal. After I got the 11th digit after the decimal point, without seeing a pattern, I stopped. I looked on my calculator (which only goes to 9 digits after the decimal point) to double-check my work. I was right, I still had to wait on the pattern. I used Wolfram to get a solution...
0.7241379310344827586206896551 (repeating)
It goes for 28 digits before it starts to repeat! It got me thinking: I wonder what two-digit denominator would lead to the longest period/repeating part of a decimal. I would ask one of my professors, but I am afraid he would put the question on our next test. Back to math homework. Good night inter-web.