When It Rains It Pours

Man, this economy keeps getting worse. Now I have to rewrite last year’s warm-up questions:

Most Santa Cruz houses are more expensive now than they were a decade ago. A $450,000 house with three bedrooms, a pool, and a monkey butler, increased to $1,000,000. What was its percent increase?

This one is actually pretty easy to adjust.

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I'm Dan and this is my blog. I'm a former high school math teacher and current head of teaching at Desmos. He / him. More here.

6 Comments

  1. Do you allow or even supply calculators to your Algebra students for these kind of questions?

    What is your view of the role that calculator use plays with regard to student development of number sense, especially integer operations?

  2. Does anyone else get bored on test days?

    I teach the same geometry course, lack 2 periods, all day. It’s boring during test days.

    BLAH>>>

  3. Hey, why not have the kids rewrite risk assessment models for loans, and see what happens when you inflate the LTV and relative to the Debt to Income Ratio? Oh, I guess most mortgage lenders have already tried that tried that.

  4. You might want to get the Zillow graphs showing the price of Santa Cruz housing over the past decade. Unfortunately, the Zillow people are too innumerate (or think their readers are) to use a log scale for the y-axis, but the graphs are still a nice addition to the question. They also point out that the recent “crash” in housing prices only dropped the prices back about 4 years, just chopping off the bubble, not the steady rise in housing prices.