This is bizarre. The info provided in the question was that Marty ate more than Luis, the question was how would that be possible given that Marty ate 4/6 of his while Luis ate 5/6 of his. The answer the kid wrote (Marty’s pizza was bigger than Luis’) is the only possible correct answer.
The grader is asserting that the information given in the question was wrong and that “actually it was Luis who ate more pizza”–even though it stated as a premise that “Marty ate more”. How are you supposed to give a correct answer on a test if you are expected to accept one premise (proportion of pizzas eaten) while disregarding another premise (Marty ate more than Luis)? How do you decide which part to disregard? Would they have accepted the answer, “Luis actually only ate 3/6 of his pizza, not 5/6)”? Wouldn’t that be just as valid an answer as “Marty actually didn’t eat more than Luis”?
Agree, this question is such hot shit that I can’t imagine it popping up in any real world maths test
The question is good, how given one smaller and one larger fraction could the person eating a smaller percent still have eaten more total pizza? That’s a fun brain puzzle.
The problem is the teacher.
And by gaslighting the kids, they’re teaching them not to trust their own ability to reason, crushing their critical thinking skills. It sets them up to submit to authoritarianism and go along with obvious lies instead of trusting their own senses and questioning authority.
This is genuinely baffling. What was that teacher on.
that kid passes my class with honors
the teacher is a moron
Same. Question sucks. Teacher is a tool. Kid needs bonus points for a creative solution.
This always pissed me off about all formal school. They don’t want a good answer, they don’t even want the correct answer. They want you to give them the answer they previously told you to give them, regardless of all other factors.
Real life doesn’t work like that. In reality, the “correct” answer is anything that completes the objective. In this scenario, the answer provided was reasonable, logical and most importantly, it was not incorrect.
The title of this post is disappointing. The given answer is sound and it seems safe to assume it was arrived at by thinking mathematically.
Right? He’s rationally explaining how that was possible given the question of “how” it is possible. In my opinion that question was written poorly.
I suspect many commenters are missing the point, the student’s response can only be the correct and expected answer to this question. Teacher has it wrong.
No. The teacher did not have it wrong. Does not mean the student is right … Marty and Luis both had their own pizza. Marty had a big pizza and “only” managed to eat 4/6th of it. Luis had a small pizza, and “only” managed to eat 5/6th of his. If you want to give a nitpicking correct answer: a single pizza does not have (4 + 5)/6th pieces. x/6th implies the pizza(s) were divided into 6 parts … so: it can only be 2 pizzas.
Yes, it can only be two pizzas. The question is “how is this possible” which is correctly answered by the student. The teacher talking like that’s not how pizza works, is indeed incorrect.
4/6 of a 10” pizza is more pizza than 5/6 of a 6” pizza.
I’ve read this a few times and I’m genuinely not sure I understand what you’re saying.
4/6th is a smaller ratio than 5/6 the only way for 4/6 to be greater would be for the area to increase.
Expressed as percentages it would be 66% (approx) eaten vs 83% (approx) where the person that ate 66% ate more pizza. The only way that’s possible is if the area of the pizza that 66% of was consumed was greater. (Strictly speaking the volume could be at play here too but I’m going to assume they’re the same height for the question).
I genuinely don’t see any way his thinking was wrong, or how this could be answered another way.
I might genuinely be missing something but if so this question is poorly worded.
They’re just doing the same thing as the teacher and assuming the two pizzas have to be of equal size and therefore it’s an impossible situation.
Ah, a teacher that does not comprehend the barometer
Two other right answers:
- Luis’ pizza is at least <whatever is the correct fraction> smaller than Marty’s (which is basically the same answer as the kid’s)
- Marty ate someone else’s pizza besides his own
And, for funsies:
- Luis’ pizza is 50% crust, so it doesn’t fully count as pizza
- Luis doesn’t like pizza and actually fed the dog while nobody was looking
- Marty is many years older than Luis, therefore he has eaten many years’ worth of pizza ahead of Luis
This is completely unrelated but I cannot believe Calandra is a real world name.
The designers of the video game Path of Exile should’ve called their super rare item “Kalandra’s Barometer” instead of “Kalandra’s Mirror”.
Well the question does assign ownership to the pizza, so Marty can eat his pizza then give it to Luis making it his pizza
correct fraction = 4/5, as in, Luis’ pizza is smaller than the 4/5 (80%) of Marty’s pizza.
The teacher is fucking stupid. The question says Marty ate more, that is not only possible it is a given.
The teacher is fucking stupid.
The teacher is likely under-trained, overworked, and under-qualified for the class. Common in districts where the focus of the administration is driving down the cost of education rather than delivering the highest quality.
That is, of course, assuming this is a real homework and not some agitprop churned out by a Facebook group or a social media account more interested in generating outrage than education.
With the choice of marker, I’d say its rage bait.
Can confirm. My grad mentor’s grad mentor used green because he’d read a paper that green causes more eye strain and he thought it’d be hilarious to grade in green.
I grade in green because it drives my students nuts.
So you’re not confirming that it’s rage bait but rather that it’s a real graded paper.
I don’t even know anymore. Grading in green is ragebait.
“Under-qualified” for the class? Are we really setting the bar beneath the level of a grade schooler?
Sadly, yes. A third grade transfer student from a good school district might very well be smarter than their teacher. Especially in rural areas.
Yeah, I’m not buying underqualified. Underqualified for a fifth grade diploma, maybe.
I agree, the kid is correct. This is the only viable answer.
Not true. Marty could have also eaten pizza that was not his.
No, “Marty ate 4/6 of his pizza”
Which does not preclude him also eating 1/6 each of Martha’s, Denise’s, and Sam’s pizzas.
It does not state that Marty only ate 4/6 of his pizza. Nor that he ate only of his own pizza. It defined a minimum pizza consumption threshold for Marty without further details.
You have to use the variables given. He ate 4/6 of his pizza and the other guy ate 5/6. Saying he ate the other guys pizza would result in a tie (not more) and is not an option. The answer they wanted was “impossible”, the kid gave the only real shenanigan proof viable answer.
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 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
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.
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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 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 Forbes 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 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.
I always knew someone else knew about the series!
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. I remember laughing my ass off in the movie theater at the scene with the bear when Asterix in America came out.
Astérix was also popular in Québec in the same way.
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?
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.
Commendable for the kid to be thinking outside of the box, and a bit shitty of the teacher for not giving them maybe half a point (because it’s a correct answer, but not the correct/expected answer). The test maker is also to blame - they should’ve taken care to eliminate all ambiguity - it’s a math test after all.
The teachers response is incorrect. It is stated as fact that marty ate more pizza.
Oh, yes, you’re right! I read the question again.
P.S. And if really is a fake/made up test like some other folks claim in the comments, just look at how much of a discussion it throws us into.
The kid’s answer is the only correct answer. It’s not half right, or 5/6 or 4/6 right. It’s the only correct answer that fits the question. The teacher is a moron who has no business in a math classroom except as a remedial student.
Marty could’ve eaten someone else’s pizza besides his own, which would also make it a correct answer. The question didn’t say he ate 4/6 of his pizza and nothing else
I like it!
My wife has pointed out that there is indeed one other correct answer. One kids is bigger – OR, the other kid’s is smaller. TWO right answers.
Those are the same answer, one bigger makes the other smaller
I see you noticed that too ;)
Maybe it’s not smaller, just farther away?
Reminds me of the Homestar Runner one where Marzipan kept saying this the whole episode.
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
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.
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.
The statement and question make perfect sense. The kid has the only “reasonable” answer.
Curriculum and unappetizing methods of teaching are the problems.
This kid has the right to question, to speak out what’s really logical, and is likely to be more street-wise.
i can’t fathom this being real, most probably this was made for karma farming or something.
Teachers like this exist. One of my kids had an elementary school teacher like this. Two examples:
- The math assignment was about currency denominations; what coins and bills you need to make up $7.42, for example. My kid answered using $2 bills (uncommon in the US but still printed), as we have them at home. Teacher marked the answer wrong because teacher didn’t mention $2 bills in class.
- The writing assignment was to rewrite the Snow White story from the perspective of another character. My kid, having read a bunch of those “twisted tales” and recently fallen in love with “Wicked”, wrote from the evil queen’s perspective and made her a sympathetic character. Teacher marked her down for “changing the story” without acknowledging my kid’s creativity. Teacher did not back down when we confronted her on this during our parent teacher conference.
(FWIW, in both cases we reassured our kid that they did great in both cases, and that we were proud of them.)
Teacher : draw a triangle with sides of length 1 inch, 2 inches and 3 inches
Kid : but you can’t do that. You get a 3 inch line. Other students proceed to draw skinny triangles.
Teacher : you’re wrong Kid. Everybody else can do it, what’s your problem?
True story.
You can’t draw a right triangle with those lengths, but you can draw A triangle with those sides.Well I’m an idiot. Hey wait what if you add a 4th dimensional axis? Was this children’s school perhaps in 4 dimensional space?
You’re asserting that three colinear line segments, with angles only of 0° and 180°, form a triangle?
I made a goof. I am factually wrong. I pray we all forget this quickly and for whatever being can grant it to grant mercy upon my mortal self.
How? Doesn’t this run afoul of the inequality theorem?
The way it works is I’m actually a moron and am wrong.
Ha, fair. I was concerned you were about to drop some non-Euclidean Cthulhu deep-magic on us.
I mean that DOES sound fun…
But could he draw red sides with blue ink?
It’d work if it were 3, 4 and 5
Also what teacher uses a green felt tip pen?
Actually a kilogramme of feathers is heavier, because you have the weight on your conscience of what you had to do to those poor birds to get all those feathers.
Why would you ask “How is this possible” when you expect the answer to be “it’s not”?
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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.
We can understand the context of the curriculum goals and still realize that the question was asinine and the teacher is a dipshit.
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.
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.
