Teach 180: Pseudo-Context Problems are Dull (Day 50)

I'll admit it.  I sometimes pull things from my file and say to myself, "This is what I did last year and this is what I will do this year."  And then afterwards I say to myself, "What was I thinking last year? That was awful."

Well, today was one of those days.  In PreCalculus we are studying function composition.  Here is the problem I pulled last year from the textbook to model a problem that students would see in the homework. 

There really is no context here.  Why 1000?  Where did 5 come from?  What is it that we are selling?  The problem itself involves a bunch of algebraic manipulation and there is no real reason for doing it.  There is no question to solve.  At one point, I may have even yawned while going over this question.   No, I am pretty sure I yawned.   Why did I drag my students through this pseudo-context?  Actually, I am not sure I can even call it pseudo-context.

Tomorrow is another day and I have made notes for next year to scrap this problem and replace it with a problem grounded in real context and not pseudo-context.