What happens when a relevant context backfires

Today we took an imaginary walk to Mc Donalds near our school. We discussed the surroundings: petrol station, fruit and vege shop, post shop, train station etc. We visualised driving from the Mc Donalds carpark to the train station park and ride during peak hour traffic. You might ask what this has to do with maths? Well I was hoping for learners to mention that drivers would have to cross as far as the median strip (safe zone in the middle of the road) and then use that information to explain the meaning of the statistical term "median" which is the middle value when numerical data is placed in either ascending or descending order.

It eventually dawned on me that year 11's are too young to hold a driver's licence so they might not be familiar with the term median being the painted lines in the middle of the road and as passengers in cars or on buses, they are more passive and possibly not as alert as licenced drivers. My context totally backfired....... I was forced to move onto plan B as my original plan seemed foreign/unknown.

I asked each learner how many hours they spent on social media a day and we recorded our data on mini whiteboards. Good comeback with this context so I felt somewhat revived. Next step was to rearrange data in ascending order, that went well...............now onto median...............Learners were asked to highlight the middle value from their set of numbers. After about 30 minutes we all had an accurate median......phew.......it was well worth investing in that activity as every single learner can now articulate the statistical term "median"