Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit
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When I was in elementary, my teacher said that "Lutetia" was how the Romans called the city of Liege. As an avid reader of Asterix comics, I knew this isn't true and corrected her and said it was the Roman name of Paris. She insisted that it is Liege. Anyway, the next day, she came back to class and said that she looked it up and that I was indeed correct and Lutetia referred to Paris and gave me a chocolate bar and told me to keep reading comics. Good teacher.
In my country, the written final exams include a Q&A section in the beginning of the test, where the teacher and the headmaster are present, and where they present the tasks and students are allowed to ask questions. After that section, the headmaster leaves and students and teachers aren't allowed to talk for the rest of the test.
I noticed a missing specification in one of the tasks. It was a 3D geometry task, and it was missing one angle, thus allowing for infinite correct results. During the Q&A section I asked about that, and my teacher looked sternly past me to the end of the room and said "I am sure the specifications are correct". If there was an actual error in the specifications, the whole test would have been voided and would have to be repeated at a later date, for all the students attending.
As soon as the headmaster was out of the room, he came to me and asked where he made the mistake. He then wrote a fitting spec on the whiteboard.
I liked that guy. He was a good teacher.
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If you state that Marty ate more as part of the question, you cannot answer in any other way, because it denies mathematical logic here. You introduced a lie as part of the problem, and if I need to decide myself which part of the statement is a lie, I can pick whatever I want, let's say, Marty didn't ate 4/6, but 6/6. This teacher should be taken to the gulag.
Pretty sure its a joke and not a real exam.
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Both of your questions would be satisfied by the student's answer though
True, even with the "Is this possible?" the student's answer should have been ok. But with the "how" the teacher's answer is plainly wrong.
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I always knew someone else knew about the series!
What do you mean someone else? Who doesnt?
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That's not what it is, no.
Teachers make mistakes, like any human being, and a good teacher can deal with the fact that they made a mistake and that a student found said mistake.
A teacher who insists on being right over being correct is a bad teacher, because a teacher is supposed to teach a child understanding and knowledge, not blind obedience above anything else.
That's how you end up with a population who agree with the leader even if he tells them the sky is green.
That’s how you end up with a population who agree with the leader even if he tells them the sky is green.
Or you are in Japan, maybe even North Korea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_language
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Math education in the empire is TERRIBLE. There is no actual math taught. At best it's applied analogies like this pizza BS. The teachers have never taken any advanced math so they don't even know what they're not teaching. The goals (eg. calculus) are completely worthless. The entire system is stuck in the 1700s. It's a complete failure. It's intentional too. The goal is creating obedient, little computers not critical thinkers. That would be a threat to the system. This image is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
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In elementary school our teacher asked us to spell the current year with roman numerals, so I worked out "MCMXCVIII", which I was quite proud of. But the teacher came back at me quite snarkyly and said it's much easier to just substract 2 from 2000, "IIMM" duh!
It was only many years later that I accidently learned that he was indeed full of shit and I was right all along.
It would've been easier to pretend it was 2000 and just write MM
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it's fairly clear there are two pizzas, but as to 'how' someone eats more than someone else... this is not really a simple math question, there are too many unknown variables. Maybe one has Bulemia, maybe one of them is 6'9" and has a much bigger appetite. Maybe one of the people has a congenital deformity resulting in two mouths... This question is not a math question, it's an exercise in creativity.
How did they eat it?
They put it in their mouth, probably chewed a few times, swallowed, and then repeated the process as needed.
Q.E.D.
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Math education in the empire is TERRIBLE. There is no actual math taught. At best it's applied analogies like this pizza BS. The teachers have never taken any advanced math so they don't even know what they're not teaching. The goals (eg. calculus) are completely worthless. The entire system is stuck in the 1700s. It's a complete failure. It's intentional too. The goal is creating obedient, little computers not critical thinkers. That would be a threat to the system. This image is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]You might afford too much malice to something that might be just a generational incompetence and total lack of care. Smart kids don't increase this quarter's profits, therefore are irrelevant.
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Pretty sure its a joke and not a real exam.
"Reasonableness" as the heading implies that they've been working on whether a word problem makes any sense at all. It's, perhaps ironically, an attempt to help them build critical thinking skills. Then, elementary school teachers are not all brilliant minds themselves, and even the ones who are incredibly gifted educators are overworked, and their schools are generally underfunded. You get a cheap resource, maybe even a free one, or one your former mentor threw together late one night three years ago, and you can end up with a sloppy question. If you yourself are having a bad moment, or are not particularly talented, or the kid is a known shitass, then yeah, you could overreact and respond like this.
Having just sat with my kid through a year of 5th grade math homework, it is completely plausible that this is a real quiz and a real response. Some of the question writing even in the professionally made materials is just not good, partly because it presumes a laser focus on a single "instructional variable," despite mandates to teach holistically.
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That's not what it is, no.
Teachers make mistakes, like any human being, and a good teacher can deal with the fact that they made a mistake and that a student found said mistake.
A teacher who insists on being right over being correct is a bad teacher, because a teacher is supposed to teach a child understanding and knowledge, not blind obedience above anything else.
That's how you end up with a population who agree with the leader even if he tells them the sky is green.
Again, as an adult looking to find something to be outraged at, you are far overthinking the problem. You assume those kids don't understand what that week's math lessons were about. And therefore what any quiz/test would be about at the end of the week. All of them would have been coached all week long on what to look for in that quiz/test.
If the teacher was so wrong, explain to me how a majority of the students would have understood that question and been able to figure out the correct answer and provided the correct format? Getting one odd answer on one test/quiz in a room of perhaps 20 students is not indicative of a poorly written question or if a teacher is unwilling to admit they were wrong. Odd answers are just generally an isolated issue, unless this is a repeated problem for this student, which would be indicative of a deeper learning issues. Which is something we don't know or can't know in this case.
Your premise would hold value if you knew every student in the classroom got the question wrong or provided the same answer that is shown. But you have no idea if that's the case.
There are other things in this world that deserve to be outraged about. This particular thing ain't one of them.
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I agree that the idea they were teaching was "is it reasonable for 4/6 to be larger than 5/6", but it was too sloppy to be in a word problem with cultural context. Sometimes if you're the teacher and a kid stumbles onto a loophole this big, you have to take the L and update your materials for the next year. Just add, "Marty and Luis ordered small pizzas at Joe's," and this goes away. This feels like the question writer had been in a groove with drafting more abstract problem sets, and didn't do a good job when shifting gears into the word problem section.
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Again, as an adult looking to find something to be outraged at, you are far overthinking the problem. You assume those kids don't understand what that week's math lessons were about. And therefore what any quiz/test would be about at the end of the week. All of them would have been coached all week long on what to look for in that quiz/test.
If the teacher was so wrong, explain to me how a majority of the students would have understood that question and been able to figure out the correct answer and provided the correct format? Getting one odd answer on one test/quiz in a room of perhaps 20 students is not indicative of a poorly written question or if a teacher is unwilling to admit they were wrong. Odd answers are just generally an isolated issue, unless this is a repeated problem for this student, which would be indicative of a deeper learning issues. Which is something we don't know or can't know in this case.
Your premise would hold value if you knew every student in the classroom got the question wrong or provided the same answer that is shown. But you have no idea if that's the case.
There are other things in this world that deserve to be outraged about. This particular thing ain't one of them.
If the teacher was so wrong, explain to me how a majority of the students would have understood that question and been able to figure out the correct answer and provided the correct format?
But did they? How do you know? Have you seen the other students' assignments?
Most likely, this specific task wasn't actually a homework task at all but created just for this meme.
But teachers like this exist, and I stand by that that these teachers are wrong. Understanding and actually thinking about a problem are much more important skills than to obey blindly and follow pre-set directions without even reading what the question actually says.
I'd say, a student that answers the question as expected is failing in regards to reading comprehension.
And from my experience, if a question is worded as wrongly as the one in the meme, then half the class will have it wrong and there will be a group of parents at the next parent-teacher conference complaining about it.
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Math education in the empire is TERRIBLE. There is no actual math taught. At best it's applied analogies like this pizza BS. The teachers have never taken any advanced math so they don't even know what they're not teaching. The goals (eg. calculus) are completely worthless. The entire system is stuck in the 1700s. It's a complete failure. It's intentional too. The goal is creating obedient, little computers not critical thinkers. That would be a threat to the system. This image is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
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You might afford too much malice to something that might be just a generational incompetence and total lack of care. Smart kids don't increase this quarter's profits, therefore are irrelevant.
No. See sibling comment where I linked to George Carlin.
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Marty ate some of someone else's pizza
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They're not on about the kids answer. They're talking about the teacher saying Luis ate more. How? It literally says in the question Marty ate more.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]what does this even teach the kid about statements by authority? that it’s all lies and trust nobody?
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
Given 4/6 x > 5/6 y therefore x > 5/4 y
Marty's Pizza must have been more than a quarter larger than Luis'. The kid is exactly right.
And the teacher is not flexible enough to engage outside their expectations for how the question was supposed to be answered.
Clearly the expectation was for the kids to take the unstated assumption that the two pizzas were of the same size, and reject the premise as unreasonable (note the heading "Reasonableness").
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No. See sibling comment where I linked to George Carlin.
I love George very much, but he was a comedian, and you linked his comedy show. Brilliant, like everything he did, comedy show.
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In elementary school our teacher asked us to spell the current year with roman numerals, so I worked out "MCMXCVIII", which I was quite proud of. But the teacher came back at me quite snarkyly and said it's much easier to just substract 2 from 2000, "IIMM" duh!
It was only many years later that I accidently learned that he was indeed full of shit and I was right all along.
it’s much easier to just substract 2 from 2000, “IIMM” duh!
For anyone wondering why this is wrong, there are two reasons:
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The roman numeral system only traditionally contains subtractions from the next higher five- and tenfold symbol. So you can subtract I from V and X, X from L and C, C from D and M
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The subtractions only generally allowed one symbol to be subtracted, with a few notable exceptions like XIIX for 18 and XXIIX for 28
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