AMHERST, MA — A businesswoman offers two items in her air delivery service: calculators and chicken feed. The two products come in containers of different weight and size, with different costs and sale prices. Accounting for the limited capacity of her plane, how much of each is feasible to carry?

Such was the problem facing students in an Amherst-Pelham Regional High School math class last month.

There was not one correct answer, but many. Just as there wasn’t only one specific formula to reach the answer.

That’s exactly the direction department head Jane Mudie and other members of her department think math classes should move. The Interactive Mathematics Program curriculum, published by It’s About Time Interactive, presents students with practical problems to learn skills for issues they could face in their own lives. They are not required to memorize abstract formulas.

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