This is genuinely baffling. What was that teacher on.
In my experience this is how it feels to communicate as an autistic person
Most threads on here remind me of that
Interesting, I’m autistic and what frustrates me here is that the question specifically asks you to posit “How is it possible” and the teacher insists that you’re supposed to just say that it’s not. Makes me want to just Calvinball the whole damn exam. 5 + 7, what is the answer? Purple. Obviously.
And it’s not even some crazy stretch to make the premises work. Like if it had said the pizzas are the same size, I’d have to try to come up with something ridiculous to meet the requirements of the question, and would probably just leave it blank. But people order different sized pizzas every day.
The “correct” answer contradicts the requirements set out in the question.
Am I autistic? Or do I just have basic reading comprehension?
If the “correct” answer is valid, so is “actually neither of these people exist”, because we clearly aren’t expected (or allowed!) to accept the premises for sake of argument.
I’m not autistic but agree that the kid gave the correct answer and the teacher is wrong.
If that had happened to my kid the teacher and I would have had at least one meeting.
This brings back memories of when I realized that I was smarter than most of my teachers.
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.
I had a HS teacher say the the 2nd to 5th richest people were the Walton(of Walmart) family heirs. I knew this wasn’t right because at the time, Steve Balmer(of Microsoft) was the 5th or something. I printed out the Forbe list and brought it in. The teacher coped by saying that if you combined the Walton wealth, it would rank that high. He was a POS teacher for more significant reasons than that though.
I once got in trouble with my math teacher for saying “well if we’re just making things up, then sure [I cheated on a math test while sitting in the front of class where the teacher can see but I was using some kind of hidden code on my t-shirt that was a bunch of Shakespearean insults] . But what about all that Crack you were doing in your car this morning?”
Apparently my "making things up"was a slightly more serious than his. I stand by it. If we’re making shit up, we’re making shit up.
For the record, this geometry teacher was convinced I was cheating in class because I didn’t do homework. Homework was 5% of the final grade for the year according to his syllabus, I hated homework, so I figured as long as I didn’t suck at the rest of the class, I could do 0 homework and pass. I was right, passed with a 94%
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:
-
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
-
The subtractions only generally allowed one symbol to be subtracted, with a few notable exceptions like XIIX for 18 and XXIIX for 28
Holy shit this is dope!
But how did historians come up with the conclusion that, in the case of XIIX, the Romans substracted from the second X, and didn’t just write 12+10?
Not arguing, just extremely curious
The general rule is that the larger symbols come first in Roman numerals, so 12+10 (22) would be written as 10+10+1+1 or XXII.
If you literally meant the arithmetic 12+10, I’d assume they used some symbol for addition, so it would be written as XII+X, but I can’t say for sure.
-
It would’ve been easier to pretend it was 2000 and just write MM
I’m pretty sure people would have caught on to pretending it was two years in the future :)
I always knew someone else knew about the series!
An animated miniseries came out this year too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_and_Obelix%253A_The_Big_Fight
What do you mean someone else? Who doesnt?
Asterix was pretty popular in the 90s Central Europe. The movies were in theaters, the older ones got prime time slots on TV, the comics were in every book store’s kids section.
Astérix was also popular in Québec in the same way.
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.
haha, I also got some points in school for knowing that Lutetia is Paris, which I also found out by reading Asterix
Dang, in which country are you talking about Liège in elementary school?
Germany. IIRC the topic was Romans, not Liege specifically.
So…
(4/6)m > (5/6)l m > (5/4)lWhich means Marty’s pizza is more than one and a quarter the size of Luis’ pizza. We can comfortably just compare the area, since we can assume a flat disk with equal height for a pizza.
Assuming Luis’ pizza is a Domino’s Classic size of 25cm that’s an area of:
(25cm / 2)² * π = (625cm² / 4) * π = 490.874cm²So Marty’s pizza should be more than 490.874cm² * 1.25 = 613.5925cm² for 4/6 of his to be greater than of 5/6 of Luis’, so:
sqrt(613.5925cm² / π) * 2 = 13.975426964cm * 2 = 27.950853929cmSince Marty’s pizza is greater, let’s go with 28cm diameter… which happens to match exactly a Domino’s Medium size.
That’s a very realistic scenario and the teacher is an absolute idiot for not understanding.
If I ate 1/4 of my pizza and my gf ate 1/1 of her pizza, but the hidden context is mine is from Costco and hers is from mod, who ate more pizza
Was the costco size a cheese pizza, or pepperoni?
reasonableness
Every time this gets reposted, everyone misses this first word.
This isn’t a maths question.
It’s asking the student to read the question and make an observation if it’s a reasonable question and answer.
And with the information provided it’s not.
I’m sorry, what? There is precisely nothing unreasonable about this question. It has a correct answer that can be found with basic logic
Yeah, most pizzerias sell many sizes. Both answers are valid.
In fact, i would argue making an assumption, in this case about size, without declaring it, is in fact less reasonable.
But it’s perfectly reasonable for Marty to order the bigger pizza because he is a greedy bastard.
I can’t find it now and I do not think it really applies here. But someone stated that being high IQ could lead to academic problems as the high IQ learner would understand or see things that the professor could not causing the professor to mark it as incorrect.
I guess this is the idiocracy version of it.
I think this would more likely be an overworked and underpaid situation.
If I were an overworked teacher, I’d still rather award the point. Just throw down a checkmark and move on. I don’t need to write an explanation, and the kid/parents are not going to complain.
Oveework/burnout being a matter of not thinking straight while grading, especially after a day of working with children.
Not trying to make a steering defense here, just sayng i could see how this could be poor judgment.
A good teacher sees being corrected as a learning experience, and encourages their students to question them respectfully.
Bad teachers see it as a challenge to their authority.
The writing looks like first or second grade. Where do they teach fractions in that grade?
That looks like my writing now, and I’m in my 30s.
Damn, hope you graduate to Third Grade by 40!
As a very old lefty, I wish my handwriting looked that good.
Boys in particular, (though girls are not exempt from poor handwriting), will have “poor” penmanship pretty much all through elementary school and even into Jr High. And fractions are generally introduced at the end of the 3rd grade school year. And based on the question, that’s the likely grade level that test was created for.
I would bet that most of the students in that class got the answer correct because they were coached to read the question correctly-- to look for the fractions and simply compare them. And anyone else that didn’t, simply chose the wrong answer. Still, you will get a surprise answer like that every once in a while because kids are cool like that. It’s worth a chuckle as you move on.
Why would you ask “How is this possible” when you expect the answer to be “it’s not”?
Because they spent an entire math class period earlier that week explaining to the students what “reasonableness” was going to mean on their next math test, and in the context of (I’m guessing 3rd or 4th grade) arithmetic the important thing they’re trying to teach is that 5/6 is a larger fraction than 4/6. I agree that the question could be worded better (change the last two sentences to “Marty says he ate more pizza. Is this possible?”) but I strongly suspect that the missing context from their class - or maybe even at the beginning of the test - explains enough to get the answer the teacher was looking for here.
Yes, one kid starting with a larger pizza changes the situation, but fundamentally that’s an algebra question, not a “learning fractions” question.
We can understand the context of the curriculum goals and still realize that the question was asinine and the teacher is a dipshit.
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.
Well yes it is a learning fractions question. Pizza is not a number. Pizza is not a specification of size. It is absolutely crucial for understanding fractions, that a fraction of anything but two numbers will be factored by the size or whatever metric of that thing.
In the same wake you learn that “5” is not an answer to a typical physics calculation, as the unit is missing.
You could argue that it’s reasonable to assume that all pizzas are the same size but there are many pizza places that offer different sizes. You could as well argue that this is an attempt to make the kids think outside the box and come up with this explanation. How big a fraction is depends on how much the whole is is a good message you can’t learn too early. Understanding statistics is in large parts this. Many people will throw around percentages of pooling questions without ever questioning the pool of people asked.
It’s reffering to the answer of the child, not the math question.
The teacher gave the right answer. The kid assumend 4/6 is bigger than 5/6 or that the Pizza of 4/6 kid is bigger than the 5/6 Pizza.
Why is everyone in the comments stating the teacher is wrong? Are you playing into it because it’s a shitpost or are your brains working like chatbots?
Because the teacher is wrong and it’s an idiotic question.
The question asks the child to explain how Marty ate more pizza than Luis. “He didn’t” is not an appropriate answer to that question.
We know that Marty and Louis didn’t eat from the same pizza, because Marty ate 4/6 of a pizza and Luis ate 5/6 of a pizza. We also know that Marty did eat more, because it’s right there in the question.
The only logical answer is that Marty’s pizza is bigger, and so 4/6 of his pizza amounts to more pizza than 5/6 of Luis’s smaller pizza.
The question should have been “Marty ate 4/6 of a pizza and Luis ate 5/6 of a pizza. Explain who ate more pizza.”
Because these “teacher is dumber than a child” pictures are always fake. I’ve never seen a teacher write corrections on a student’s paper. Are they doing that for every wrong question on every paper? That would take forever!
How are you supposed to learn if they don’t tell you how to do it better? Not writing corrections seems like bad teaching to me.
One of my teachers demanded we fold our paper in half and leave one half empty for his corrections, another one demanded a third of the page, and the rest squeezed their comments on the edge of the page
Are they doing that for every wrong question on every paper? That would take forever!
I work in education in Texas. Yes, they do. And yes, it does. Now, most things are digital, so they have kids make a copy of the Google Doc and then grade that and leave comments on it. But if they have paper assignments, they often leave notes on them. Leaving notes on assignments and tests/quizzes (which is likely what this was) is part of their professional review.
Also, part of their regular professional review is whether or not they’re keeping proper documentation on student behavior. Different tiers of behavioral issues require different documentation/communication. So, not only are they writing notes on tests/assignments, they’re writing documentation on hundreds of students, contacting dozens of parents, creating lesson plans that have to be available in advance for parental review in case any parents want to dispute the materials, and they’re getting regular reviews.
And then, when all the kids are off enjoying summer, the teachers are working their summer job to supplement their shitty pay. And they’re going to mandatory “Professional Learning” courses to keep their teaching certification, some of which they are required to pay from their own pocket to attend.
In San Antonio, we don’t really have any “small” districts, so the numbers in the second paragraph assumes an elementary school of 300-600, middle school of 800-1200, or high school of 1200-2000 students.
Some people become teachers because they love to educate children.
Some people become teachers because they have no control in their life and want to be the boss if something.
I see you’ve met some of my old coworkers.
This happens all the time, at least in Germany. My teachers did it, and I do it too.
The picture is probably still ragebait.
You can’t teach if you don’t identify where the students are getting things wrong and correct them. It’s one of the major reasons why teachers deserve so much more pay. My wife used to be a teacher, and she worked 2-3 hours past the end of school correcting students’ work pretty much every weekday, and spent several hours every weekend planning out her lessons for the following week. She got paid significantly less than me working in a basic entry-level 9-5 office position.
Still, here in France it’s fairly common to hear people say teachers are lazy because they have a lot of vacations. In reality they do work more than many other jobs it’s just that they get a lot of “homework”.
My mom was every evening working at least 2 hours and that’s just after work. And as the head of school you already have to leave late your job. So if that’s just a chill job why isn’t more people going for it? It’s because it’s badly paid on top of long hours that can be very exhausting with kids. Also it’s a lot of responsibility to handle to just be in charge of so many children at a time.
So basically, I’m the son of a teacher, I love sharing knowledge but there is no way I will even try to do this job. Well at least not before exhausting most of the other options.
Just think about where you will be in life without going to school. I don’t think my life would be half as comfortable if a succession of teachers taught me how to learn, how to behave socially, how to share, how to argument, how to create…
Right now a lot of countries are beefing up their military and it’s often at the expense of the schools/teachers… Which make me really sad. I expect teachers to be less skilled as time passes simply because there won’t be much people to accept that kind of job so only the “worse” teachers will get it.
Teachers absolutely don’t get paid as much as they should.
Also, I was kinda curious about what states have the strongest teacher unions and surprise surprise, it maps very closely to education quality, with Montana and Massachusetts probably being the biggest outliers.
In the USA maybe, teachers in Germany are paid quite well
Ohio resident for grade school, they did it at 4 different school districts across every grade.
Can’t speak for anyone else.
I was told in 6th or 7th grade science class that you can’t hear underwater
Lol,
I was ‘taught’ by my 5th grade Geography teacher that Iceland used to be called Greenland, and vice versa and they switched the names during WW2 to “confuse the Nazi’s”. I thought that was interesting but never really took the time to think about it logically. I repeated this ‘fact’ to a friend when I was in my early 20’s and she laughed and called me an idiot. Talk about embarrassing.
Teacher got the worksheet from someone else and didn’t know the answer.
Or teacher didn’t even see this, handed it to a high school student and said “grade this stack of papers”
I had that happen several times in science classes in 3rd-8th grade. Eventually I started arguing with the teachers in class, and boy did they not like being corrected.
Sorry Ms Avery, you not knowing that “Pb” is the abbreviation of the Latin word “plumbum”, where we also get “plumbing” from due to its use in piping in rome, doesn’t mean I got the answer wrong. To her credit, she looked it up and changed my grade before the end of class.
Ms hoschouli from 7th grade can get fucked though, a parallel circuit increases amperage load, not voltage load. I knew more about electronics in 7th grade than a college graduate who teaches science class, which in hindsight isn’t that impressive considering it was general science and not electronics specific… But in 7th grade, as far as I was concerned I was hot shit for knowing more than the teacher, and getting detention for calling her out in the middle of class. Never got the grade changed and I only got out of detention because my parents called the school.
I had a teacher mark my answer incorrect because I said women can have hemophilia. They said you can’t because it’s a sex-linked disease. I said sure, but what happens if you have two X chromosomes with that gene on it? Still didn’t get the point. This was in the 80s, and I couldn’t just look it up on the internet and prove how wrong they were.
Teachers that don’t accept an unexpected but true answer are not teaching. The test taker had a correct take, one of the pizzas could be bigger than the other. It was not specified in the question. I am so glad I am out of school
It really seemed like my fellow students lost their interest in math as we went through the grades here in the US.
I still remember a kid in 2nd grade who learned how Roman numerals worked because they were interesting. By grade 6, actively detested math.
Curious.
Kid should’ve gotten half credit at the very least.
This answer shouldn’t have been unexpected, seeing as how it’s the correct answer.
The test key has the expected answer, which may even be wrong. If the test taker responds with something else, even if it solves the problem, it is not the expected answer. It’s stupid.
Your fault for not listing the size and list of toppings for both pizzas, one could be a small personal pizza size with just cheese and pepperoni and the other a full huge net Yorker sized one with double of everything.
Shit, pne was probably a pizza bagel and the other a Pizza Hut Bigfoot.
Just to prove the point in an absurd way.
Or even a step further, the measurement is in volume not area. This could be a Chicago style pizza where 1 slice equals 2 slices of New York style.
Ahh, fractions and word problems, the bane of my education (seriously, why do we bother with fractions when decimals are easier to compute and express?)
Imo fractions are way more simple in many cases than decimal numbers. Saying 1/3rd is way more useful than hitting someone with the 0.33333333333333… Quick mental computations with fractions are also simpler in this case. Though this question (and questions like it) seem useless to me indeed.
Or just say 33%?
33.33333333333…%, you mean?
In 99/100 of the situations people do not care about you saying 33% instead of 1/3 or 33,3333333333% or 33,33…%
Shocking twist: boldly estimating 99/100 of situations is less accurate (more hyperbolic) than asserting 33% or ⅓ or whatever is accurate.
In many cases that’s fine, I’ve done so regularly. But when you want to be precise without making it complicated you can just say the fraction as well. But in order to do that you need people to feel comfortable with it, therefore we need to teach kids this from a young age. I’m not saying we always need them, but they’re definitely very useful tools that you want at the ready when you need them. To make quick calculations in your head it’s often way simpler to use the fraction than the real number. And in cases like 1/3rd or 3/7ths it’s a way simpler, accurate and more efficient way to communicate the number than to name the rounded number.
At least where I am from we do get fractions in school.
Most people here will say “een derde” aka a 3rd, but it is mostly not used as a precise measurement or anything. Something like 3/7th is rarely used andd we would say 42,9%. In cases where the differences that create are relevant we would communicate it on paper or digitally where iirc we would still use percentages or decimals. Then again I am an accountant and not a technical analysist or anything. For me the difference between 42,9% and 42,85714 will mean a couple thousand at most.
Doesn’t imperial metrics also use frations from time to time? Metric doesn’t do that, but we have things like nanometers etc.
I mean I understand, but in the case of .33333333333333… isnt it actually represented as “point three repeating”?
Possible, but at least in my experience most normal people know 1/3rd and understand what it means, but if I’d throw a “point three repeating” at them they’d probably get confused. Fractions are just a tool to communicate stuff more efficiently, good in some scenarios, confusing in others. It would be cool if we could teach everyone the “repeating” syntax as well because it’s another useful tool.
-
who says, 5/6 is easy to mentally understand than 0.83־.
-
is a reasonable way to start thinking about arithmetics, and basically to start doing simple math IMO.
-
Man, if you can’t understand fractions, you don’t actually understand the math, you’re just trained to use a formula.
I understand fractions, I simply doubt their utility.
For example, they allow you to write
1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1
Which is not possible in decimal
Tf you mean?? You can write it in a repeating decimal as
0.333....using ellipsis. https://wiki.froth.zone/wiki/Repeating_decimalSo you think
0.333.... + 0.333.... + 0.333.... = 1Is clearer and more concise than
1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1
Fractional representation is the method for rational numbers, particularly if they are part of an intermediate calculation.
Decimals are lossy, fractions aren’t.
No because you said this:
If you want to precisely write to infinity you write 1/3.
You can also precisely write to infinity if you write 0.333…
Decimals are lossy, fractions aren’t.
Decimals aren’t lossy, any fraction can be converted to decimal but it just takes longer to write.
The fraction 1/3 is a compact and unambiguous representation—it doesn’t rely on an ellipsis or an understanding of infinite series to be interpreted. It can easily be used in later calculations (you never see … notation in algebra). It is a useful notation.
As soon as you use decimals in computer and human calculations, they become lossy.
I’m not really sure what hill you are trying to die on. Fractions are useful, even if you don’t know how to use them.
well, no, it’s understood that a third is .333 to infinity, so .333+.333+.333 does equal 1 for any use not requiring precision to the point of it mattering that it was actually .33333335 when measured.
No. You wrote .333
If you want to precisely write to infinity you write 1/3.
actually .33333335
Holy fuck. Where did that 5 come from?
It came from it not being actually .333 to infinity when measured in the required engineering precision i was talking about. It’s literally a “common use” mathematical convention (you clearly are unaware of) that three times .333 is one. Solves a lot of problems due to a failure of the notation.
3 times 0.333 is 0.999 not 1.
Saying it equals 1 may be a common engineering convention, but it is mathematically incorrect.
There is no failure of notation if fractions are used, which is why I gave this example of usefulness.
Saying shit like that implies you don’t really get that they are the same thing.
I had situations like this at least a few times a year in school.
I usually managed to convince the teacher I was right.And yah this kid is almost certainly ND.
Not just the answer, but the handwriting screams dysgraphia.
It looks a lot like mine.Or the kid just understands the given scenario and prioritized coming up with a valid answer instead of assuming the question is bad. You don’t have to be ND to be thoughtful/observant or to be surprised that the question expected to be called out as wrong that early.
On the handwriting, it could be that, or it could be typical elementary school handwriting. Or someone imitating elementary school writing for internet points in a fake math question.
Is there any reason at face value why the teacher’s answer is correct? From my perspective the teacher is an idiot and missing some basic math skills.
Marty ate 66% vs the other kid’s 83%, no way “marty ate more” with the information given.
reasonableness
This is likely a question about some topic on reasonable questions and answers, rather than a maths question.
If I saw two people order different sizes of pizzas, my mind wouldn’t be blown, and nobody would consider the situation unreasonable.
no way “marty ate more” with the information given.
that is the ‘Expected’ answer
So this is sort of a true/false math problem given to us, the viewer, out of context.
How is that possible?
“False”
🤷♂️
By stating the answer given by the problem is wrong, and “showing the work” to demonstrate why it’s wrong.
No. Within the parameters of the question it IS possible and the kid gave the correct answer.
A small fraction of X can have a greater absolute value than a large fraction of Y when X is suffienctly larger then Y.
The question literally says “Marty ate more pizza”. It’s a foundational fact that you’re given as a part of the problem. If refuting the basic facts of the question are on the table and the answer was the say “Actually, no he didn’t” then you might as well say something like “No, he actually at 1/6 of his pizza” and claim all the numbers given are dishonest.
