These kids were in something of a no win situation. I'm imagining a different class where 75% of the students said that there wasn't enough information to comp

These kids were in something of a no win situation. I'm imagining a different class where 75% of the students said that there wasn't enough information to complete the problem: --- 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. -- 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.