My mission today was to produce some literacy materials for Maths. I was determined that I would not let personal fear get in the way of fulfilling my orders, so I asked the Head of Maths for some direction. She furnished me with several chunks of text which I would be able to use to generate Maths-specific reading tasks. The first one I tackled posed a real problem for me: Colour mixing. Everybody knows that red and blue make purple, and that red and yellow make orange - but that's elementary paint mixing. When it comes to mixing light, well, that's Physics, surely? And when you add in the fact that suddenly, light has divisions called magenta and cyan, well, I have to admit, I did spend rather a lot of time trying to figure out that magenta is reddish purple (easy!) and cyan is....what colour is that, exactly?
Then there was a lot of incomprehensible stuff about an apple reflecting green light, and absorbing red and blue light. Absorbing red and blue? Where? Under its skin? And how does the apple know that it has to reflect green light? Is the skin not green to begin with? And then, I'm afraid, I'm into Philosophy, which is perfectly useless when I'm trying to figure out how to put light equations into a simple table for Literacy purposes.
I'm supposed to be reasonably intelligent - but I still can't work out which light you take away to leave the colour you need reflected. So, the question is, if I can't understand the simplest of Mathematics/Physics, then what chance have the pupils for whom these resources are created?
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