Real World Math: Project Manager

When I first started this blog the idea was to categorize assignments based on a series of twitter style hashtags, which would ultimately allow a teacher to quantify how differentiated their lessons had been – in a macro sense at least.  I have not really stuck to that idea, but one of the original hashtags I had was #industry.  The purpose of #industry was pretty simple – someone had to do this in their job.

I was hoping that #industry would end up as a collection of problems that come directly from people’s  work experiences.  These experiences would be served to student’s unedited from the workplace to the classroom.  Inherent in this hashtag would be the answer to the question “why?” because presumably anybody doing something for their job would have a clear reason as to why they were doing it. (presumably?)

So here’s the problem:  My fiance is a project manager and she had one site that was 3/4 an acre and a price from that site for $54,000 for some work. Then she had another site that was 2.5 acres and needed to know how much that same work would be for the larger site.  That was the first thing she needed to calculate, but she ended up just wanting to know how much 1 acre was worth, so she could scale it to all her other jobs.

Here’s an error analysis angle to this question –  To scale the cost for 1 acre she had initially multiplied 54,000 by 1.25 and she was genuinely curious about why that did not work.  Hhhhmmmmm…