Eleven Plus Day-dreams

We had a note from one of our teachers today who had spoken to a concerned mother last night.

The boy’s mother had explained that her son did a lot of day dreaming while he was working through papers. To find out just how much time he spent day dreaming the boy’s mother would need to sit beside him with a stop watch! This would be a trial for all concerned.

Suppose the boy was working through a verbal reasoning paper – and he had an hour to attempt the paper he could day-dream for 15 minutes, think for 20 minutes and write for 25 minutes.

As a proper Eleven Plus exercise we need to work out what fraction of the time he did the following:

Day-dream

Think

Write

If the test time of one hour is represented by 360 º on a pie chart, what angles represent the following?

Day-dreaming

Thinking

Writing

I think you should know that I have chatted to the worried mum and explained that day-dreaming is often the mark of the very able. Great painters, authors, poets and musicians have all spent time day-dreaming.

Our world would be a much poorer place with the influence of the day-dreamers of this world.

I am not sure, however, of how satisfied the worried mother was with my words of encouragement.