Dan Meyer

I've wondered as well.

I worked as a cashier in a grocery store when I was in high school. At our store we had two "main" express lines, one for twelve items or fewer, one for eight. Except for very quiet times, when there was only one cashier on duty, the twelve item line was open and the eight item line wasn't. (Any of the other lines could also be turned into express lines by setting a switch at the register, but they were less clearly marked, so lots of customers didn't notice them. They were only rarely activated.)

Your intuitions square with mine: payment was usually the biggest time sink, especially with checks and cards. Still, there were plenty of sources of variation: some items were hard to scan quickly, some customers had more produce that needed to be weighed, sometimes an item wasn't in the database or there was a dispute about its price and it needed to be checked, some lines had baggers--excuse me, service clerks--and some didn't.

And, of course, some cashiers were just faster than others. Interestingly, there was no clear pattern here. Experience (having produce codes memorized, knowing how to scan tricky items or even having their UPC codes memorized, and being good at counting cash quickly and accurately) played a role. Mostly, however, people seemed to be intrinsically motivated to do their work well, or else they weren't. We high school kids weren't collectively faster or slower than the "old people."

Some customers were faster than others…

The puzzle is a good example of pseudocontext:

"Instead of giving students realistic situations that they could analyze, textbook authors began to fill books with make-believe contexts – contexts that students were meant to believe but for which they should not use any of their real-world knowledge."[0]

I think for a math puzzle that people choose to do for fun, pseudocontext is fine. We can suspend our disbelief and engage with the math as it's intended to be engaged with.

In a classroom setting, on the other hand, I think it's best to stay away from pseudocontext. Either make the context realistic, make it clearly fantastical, or just use math as the context without trying to dress it up in real-life details.

Pseudocontext in a teaching environment is problematic because it requires learners to ignore the common-sense reasoning that they'd apply to a real-life problem and it reinforces the impression that math has nothing to do with the real world.

In this case, we could call it a dragon egg and that would be enough I think to transform it into a fantasy context, since nobody has preexisting assumptions about how durable a dragon's egg might be.

[0] https://blog.mrmeyer.com/2010/pseudocontext-saturdays-introduction/

Looking at Comp Sci major this Jan. (Provided I finish High School.)

If? Finish high school!

Okay, tough love time: you are not the only person here who things school sucks - you know why? Because school often does indeed suck. But it's not forever. Yes, ideally school should be a great educational platform but yes, sometimes you are stuck with third-rate teachers whose only interest in teaching is to make you memorise stuff.

But guess what: being able to memorise stuff is not a bad skill. Being able to do something that sucks in exchange for a future pay off (doing Comp Sci if that is what you want) is absolutely a good skill.

I don't think anybody here would lack sympathy for your situation, but you can't change your lousy school - you can only change yourself. Try and battle burnout by challenging yourself - The Internet Is Your Friend (tm). If you are being forced to memorise history dates, find a historical novel that deals with the period and read it. If you are forced to memorise math/physics formulas, find some of the great teachers online and work through their material (eg. check out http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ ).

Hang in there. No, all of life is not like that. But, life is what you make it.

Ugh! This sounds exactly like pseudo-context as described by Dan Meyer (http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=8002). There are so many awesome things to inspire someone in math, and slapping a popular movie character on rote drills seems like a misguided approach to motivating the challenge. I mean, on the one hand, good for you if you can find some trappings to make doing drills more fun. But while you're getting them to exercise skills, you're really missing out on the deep and fulfilling motivations that exist for math!