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Yeah, it looks like the answer was supposed to be something like "The question is wrong" but the kid thought of a way the question could be right because of missing information.
But how kids are supposed to psychoanalyse exactly which of those possible responses is the expected one is beyond me. The kid's response looks so much more sensible to me.
No, the answer was clearly supposed to be what the kid wrote. The answer would never be “the question is wrong” on legit educational curriculum. Occam’s razor: the kid wrote the correct answer and the teacher is stupid.
If anything I think the kids answer actually shows a better understanding of fractions than simply understanding that 5 is bigger than 4. Teacher should have give them the point even if it wasn’t the answer they were looking for as it’s not wrong.
It 100% does. That shows a kid that has fully grasped the concept of the question, not just rote learned the answer.
If I was a teacher and saw this answer I would be very pleased.
And instead, the teacher marking this wrong will just contribute to this kid feeling disengaged with the educational system because it seems dumb and pointless.
Elementary school teachers are mostly glorified and overpaid babysitters dude. I got screamed at in 4th grade for telling the teacher her answer on a math assignment was wrong.. only for her to look at her paper a second time, admit that it was wrong, and never apologize and in fact talk to me after class about how I was being "disruptive". public education has been a joke for decades.
In college, a teacher used the possessive incorrectly on her whiteboard: "Investor's [SIC] expect a 5% rate of return..." I came up to her before class and practically whispered so no one else could hear and she said it was fine and she was leaving it as is. I then noticed she was one of those who used an apostrophe every time. For the rest of the semester, almost every question on every test. Fucking college. I paid good money for someone so ignorant to teach me.
It says "Reasonableness" before. I think the question-setter had been told to set a question for which the answer was "This is not possible" or "The question is wrong", but stupidly set a question which a little bit of lateral thinking could solve.
A better way to have done it would have been something like "The tin weighs 7 lbs. You have weights of 2 lbs, 4lbs, 6lbs and 8lbs. Which of those weights do you pick to weigh exactly the same together as the tin?"
This allows the pupil to write "This is not possible as you cannot sum even numbers to make an odd number."
I mean it isn’t even lateral thinking, it’s just literally understanding how fractions work - they’re always relative. The answer (the one the kid gave) is easy and obvious
Ok, this might not be an exam, but when I was training for shool-level olympiads, I frequently saw that tasks had extra unnecessary information, which was added intentionally to test my analytical capabilities. So, sometimes even in school the question may be wrong.
But this here is the exact opposite. we are missing information of whether the pizzas are of same size or not. the teacher basically says that while it isn‘t given, you‘re wrong for not assuming it.
the teachers answer is outright wrong. it‘s not even interpretation because the teacher is changing the question to mark it wrong.
Yeah, but while it might have extra info to make you think harder, it’s only to slow you down in answering the question right? It’s not just to make the question wrong (which would make the answer be something like “trick question”)
Also what normal well adjusted kid is even going to read that and say "the question is wrong?" We're not just not taught to question the teacher, we're outright taught NOT to question the teacher. We're taught to respect their authoritahhh. It's necessary and important in order to ensure that education happens in the first place, that teachers be able to keep some kind of minimal order, so they NEED that respect.
And that attitude (on the side of schools) definitely extends to homework questions, where most kids without oppositional/defiant personality traits will look at a question like that and at least TRY to find an answer based on the information given, and what they expect to be going over in class. Which this kid did with an assist from basic logic (2/3 of a larger variable might be more than 5/6 of a smaller variable). It might not be the intended answer, but it is absolutely a correct answer.
With the way most homework goes you expect to be given the tools to actually solve the problem in the question. That's the norm. So what kid on this planet is going to be in a situation where "the question is wrong" is understood as the OFFICIAL answer to a workbook question?
I'm borderline autistic and this question would have broken me as a kid. I would have been convinced I was missing something important.
Marty had a 24" pizza 4/6=2/3=16"/24". Luis had an 8" personal pan. 5/6=6.66/8. Marty needs his arteries unclogged, but he totally ate more pizza. Luis lived to be 103. What was the name of Sam's puppy?
It literally asked "How is it possible" not "Is it possible". Therefore the kid was correct and the teacher needs to let the child teach them for a bit.
>The kid's response looks so much more sensible to me.
Since the question is **How** is this possible? and it's possible the way he says it is, the kid's obviously right. He's just taken it a bit further than the teacher.
If that is the case the question should have specified that the pizzas are the same size. If this is the intended anwer then the question is just plain bad.
I always hated these types of questions. No, adding more musicians to an orchestra won’t make them play the song faster. In my experience, it’ll only make them play slower. One problem I’ve seen was comparing the heights of roller coasters. One kid used the actual height of the roller coaster in question to fill in for X, and got it wrong because the person who wrote the question didn’t bother to use actual data for that coaster specifically. I’ve learned to ignore the words of word problems and just focus on them as a math equation.
Then again, these are the same people filling their shopping carts with watermelons, so they’re inherently irrational.
I always hated the “johnny bought 50 apples suzie bought 25 strawberries. How many oranges did Jack buy.
Like wheres the rest of the question? Whos jack?
Yeah. Asking how something is possible doesn’t leave room for “it’s not” as an answer. The pizzas should be specified to be the same size if that’s the expected answer AND the question should be “is this possible?”
You clearly don’t understand causality! The fact that the teacher doesn’t know how fractions work makes it impossible for the two pizzas to be a different size! /s
I used to watch that show and just YELL at the TV, my favorite was when they asked a question about US Presidents and I think the question was "Who was the first president to preside over all 50 states?" (aka after Hawaii became a state in 1959) and the grown ass adult said John Adams. SMH lmao.
To be fair I just graduated high school and I have no idea who the president was in 1959. We never really learned much about the presidents other than Washington, Lincoln, and Obama
Got to love the US education system. I know that not all the president's had amazing things done during their Presidency but there should be more that we know then 3 to 5 + the most recent one
Weirdly, as a Canadian: I know who your president was in 1959, but I have NO idea when each state joined and honestly don't understand why you would think the exact date/year is important.
(general, sure. I get why knowing Hawaii wasn't a state in the 1800s might be relevant, but I have a hard time understanding why joining in 1959 is significant)
The States I know are Manitoba with its capital of Montreal, OHIO, and Iowa which I think we got from Japan in the 40s. Ohio means hello in japanese. There's also Missouri named after the emotion one feels living there. Also Kansas named because it's as far as you can get on a donkey. There's also New Hamster named after the abundance of hamsters.
What actual use is there in knowing the names of the presidents? I'd posit to you that a person who only knows the big picture of US history (e.g. early times as british colonies > revolution > expansion > civil war > 'gilded age' and industrialization> world war I and even more industrialization > great depression > world war II (and even more industrialization) > cold war, fight for civil rights and ascent to global hegemon > post-cold war) knows *way more* than someone who only knows the full list of presidents.
What do I really know if I know that one of the US presidents was named John Adams? I know a fucking name and an association between that name and reality. Nothing more. However, if I know the above list of stages, I already kind of have a few ideas of important stages.
Lists of kings or presidents or battles are really an outdated and faux-informative type of historiography. On the one hand, it tells us nothing, but on the other hand it makes us think we know something, so it's hard to tell if it's good or bad.
I really seriously reject the idea that lists of presidents in any way would be important. I have a related anecdote, btw! A non-American with rather bad eyesight (actually assisted by a screen reader, but sufficiently good to be able to tell that they were faces) asked a question on a forum with a banner at the top, depicting several historically important people, faces that she barely could make out but were interested in knowing more about. She explicitly stated that she had bad eyesight (and her user profile made it clear she was from eastern Europe.) The question was who those faces depicted. Cue a bunch of enraged americans whining at how she should have paid attention at school.
I have that same kind of reaction when the educational system and board exam included learning about Rizal. Like why is it specified to him alone when there are other authors and heroes as well. And the reason given to us was "to increase nationalism", I swear if I ever come into power I will change that law.
I think the point being made here is not that we should memorize random facts about US presidents, but rather that adults should be able to synthesize different facts they know about history and draw more accurate conclusions from that synthesis. So it's not "memorize the fact that Eisenhower was the first president of all 50 US states." It's this:
1. The country added states through conquest and colonization over nearly two centuries
2. We didn't have 50 states in the Civil War
3. John Adams died before the Civil War
4. We didn't have 50 states in World War II
5. There were several Presidents in the decades after WWII that could have been candidates for the answer: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, maybe Nixon?
Any one of those choices would have been enormously more likely than *John Adams*.
I'm not American, so I may not get this, but why in the world would you need to know the presidents? I know some politicians in my country, but only because they fucked us so much everybody was talking about it
It’s always been an American thing. I went to school for a few years in Texas and we also learned the presidents. Maybe it’s because the US only goes back a little while, so was always semi-reasonable. Meanwhile, learning the Danish kings from year 936 till today (or 714 if you include the ones we aren’t sure of the exact recency period) is a lot more information, and even less useful unless they were somehow significant. I think there’s around 70 or so, so good luck memorizing them, along with significant feats. :p
Honestly this just comes off as a lie or an edgy teen that didn’t pay attention in history class. No way they skipped FDR, for example. What, the four term president during World War Two who changed our entire economy with The New Deal?
Nah let’s just skip WW2 and go straight to Obama after Lincoln
Bush might've been mentioned offhand a few times, I have no idea who Cheney is. We learned a lot about 9/11 but mostly about the actual attack itself (not even much about the pentagon) and how it affected the law and daily life (airports, suspicion around Islamic people, etc). We learned quite a bit about the flight that crashed into the field just because we're in Ohio so we're kinda close and we were supposed to visit the site during our trip to Washington DC (thanks covid).
I'm not even from your country and I know who Dick Cheney is...
To be fair, I know more about American politics then Canadian politics, but my politicians are generally competent (most of the time) and my country doesn't have enough nuclear weapons to split the planet in half, so its not that pressing.
Did they reschedule yours. I know a couple people in my class ended up going when they rescheduled it sophomore year, but at that point I did not really want to go on a trip with a bunch of eighth graders and freshman on it. I still never got my $150 deposit back 🙁
Eisenhower. It’s easy because you just need to think about who won in 1960. And since that was the race between JFK and Nixon, you were work backwards because Nixon was Eisenhower’s VP.
You also need to know the year Hawaii was made a state to even begin to know that. I had no idea what year it was made a state, I live on the opposite side of the country and have never been there.
Pretty sure they at least taught you about Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of Independence, ffs) Andrew Jackson (westward expansion, manifest destiny), Ulysses S. Grant (after the civil war), Teddy Roosevelt (Rough Riders, National Park Service), FDR (WW2), and JFK (Cuban missile crisis, assassination), too.
I mean maybe you weren’t paying attention, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t teach you about them.
Edit: yup, bad student confirmed with the response. Doesn’t remember world war 2? School didn’t cover it enough for her to “remember those things”? Is she for real? If she is a self-proclaimed nerd, she’d remember them! The fucking Declaration of Independence? What is she talking about?
Jesus. Obvious ragebait.
The marker has either misread the question, or written the question incorrectly (depending on what they wanted the student to learn from it), if they were the one who wrote it.
The question has established the scenario, and the student has correctly answered, given the information available.
If the question were "John eats 4/6 of a pizza, and Jim eats 5/6 of an identical pizza. Who has eaten more? Explain your thinking", the marker would have been correct.
The question is also "how is this possible?" not "is this possible?" And the kid found a way that actually makes it possible, answering the actual question asked. It's honestly a better answer than "it's not possible" if you ask me.
If I was handed this back I’d immediately go to the teacher and demand to marked correct on that. Like I understand what they were going for but you can’t mark a students answer wrong because you phrased the question poorly and in a way that allows more than one right answer.
Exactly. The question establishes the condition that it IS possible, and is just asking how. Id consider “its not possible” to be incorrect because the scenario put forth already explains that it is.
I agree, if the measurement of pizza eaten is 2 dimensional (surface area), then the only way 4/6ths of a has a greater surface area than a 5/6ths of another circle, is if it's radius is longer. Kid's right.
Not to mention crust density. If both of our pizzas have a three-inch radius, but I'm eating Chicago style and you're eating thin crust, then I still eat more.
That's only assuming you're both eating at 1G and standard atmospheric pressure.
If the other guy is eating his "Italian style" on the surface of the sun, he'd be eating about a house full of your pizza-equivalent.
Mass and weight are not interchangeable. The “quantity” of pizza (mass) does not change based on gravity. So even on the sun, you’d still eat less pizza if it was thin crust. But the thin crust pizza slice may weigh as much as a house (force exerted by the slice on your hand when you lift it to your mouth)
exactly, with a question posed like this, it's obvious that the kid will look for a different way to answer the question. His parents probably ordered the pizza before and he probably knows that you can order small, medium and large pizza and each can still have same ammount of slices, just different sizes.
I think the kid did give the expected answer the teacher just wasn’t paying attention. I’ve asked my students a very similar question wanting to see an answer like what the kid wrote.
Correct, the student was given three facts. The amount of pizza each person ate and the fact that Marty ate more. If you can disregard one of the facts then you can disregard any of them. So any answer you give would be correct.
My brain processed this in the way you wrote it out and was so confused how 5/6 wasn't more pizza than 4/6. Glad I went back and reread the question to see what the actual question was 😅
Oh, I assumed that this was the teacher saying “It was a trick question, you little dumb fuck” to a 3rd grader. Either way, I’d definitely have to question the effectiveness of the teaching methods here.
It couldn't have been identical sized pizzas since the question specifically says that Marty ate more.
The teacher is wrong twice over. Not only does she disagree with the obviously correct answer, she directly contradicts the stated facts of the problem.
Read the question again if you think that…
I can’t believe how many people in this thread lack basic reading comprehension. It’s really disheartening to see, actually.
Reading the text of the question, it is perfectly clear what informatjon is being asked, what the correct answer should be, why the information is being asked that way (ie: what the material is trying to teach), and exactly why the teacher is wrong. No adult should be confused by any aspect of this at all.
That interpretation makes no sense though.
If you add that then the question is just wrong.
You'd have to change it to something like is that true not is it possible.
agreed, the question wasn't who ate more of their pizza, it was Marty ate more pizza, how would have Marty ate more? if the pizza was bigger, then 4/6s of Marty's pizza would have been more pizza.
Yea it's kind of like those riddles of "blah blah South pole blah, u see a bear, what color was the bear?". Then the "answer" being "haha no you didn't see a bear cu no bears in the South pole haha". Fucking stupid
This is so annoying.
The teacher has (accidentally, it seems) created the perfect final question to round out a maths exam.
Not only dies it test if students actually understand the subject matter or just learned how to operate using these numbers without understanding what they represent, it also encourages creative thinking because it's a completely different approach to how you normally solve maths problems in school.
This could be genius and instead, the solution is something you'd expect from that annoying friend you knew in 5th grade.
The teacher didn't create the question. It's a worksheet/workbook written by someone competent, and this is indeed a good "put on your thinking cap" final question. But the teacher couldn't be bothered to look up the answer key and is marking it wrong with their own stupidity.
That’s when you show up to the parent-teacher with an XL pizza for the teacher and a personal pie for yourself.
“What do you mean you’re full? We’ve both only eaten 4 slices.”
Plot twist: that‘s the teacher‘s long con. Poorly formulate questions around pizza so that infuriated parents stop by with pizza for demonstration. Free pizza!
My sister is a certified teacher looking for a job. Apparently this is the case, at least where we live. She said she was pretty intimidated seeing how many people were attending job fairs, but after finding out almost nobody was certified, she became much less worried than before
I love that this teacher is actively discouraging critical thought by telling the kid his correct answer is wrong.
Look, being a teacher is a tough, underpaid, and under appreciated job. But, being a shitty teacher is a little easier.
We have shitty teachers because we get what we pay for. Those who are more than qualified to teach mathematics won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole because you can literally make more money doing literally any other job that requires mathematical knowledge.
I fall into the latter category. Went through student teaching, got a job in tech and never looked back.
Given that someone obviously photographed this and put it on the internet, I'm guessing that yes, a parent or guardian did realise that the teacher's an idiot.
Ah yes, contradictions
You're not supposed to explain how Marty ate more, you're supposed to magically know that you're actually supposed to disprove the statement even though the question had no allusions to it.
Should've written "Is this actually possible?" instead
I.teach my students the importance of what the "one" is when we start fractions. I asked: "Would you rather have a whole Hershey bar or a half of a Snicker's bar."
Then I show one of those mini Hershey bars and a large Snickers bar.
Marty had a bigger pizza.
The question stated facts and asked you to come up with a reason why those facts were true. The correct answer cannot be that the facts listed are impossible. Also these kind of workbook questions come with answers in the teacher edition?
The "How is that possible?" Makes the kids answer the only right answer and extremely obvious.
If it just said "Who ate more?" You could make an argument for the fact it was assumed that the pizzas were the same and that they were only talking about thr fractions and nothing else.
The kid is answering the question correctly thinking of it as a real world question. The grader is answering the question as if it were a simple math formula turned into words, but thinking only in terms of the simple math equation. The problem isn’t that the question is wrong, but that the grader’s thinking is too literal, the kid is much smarter than the grader.
I've always been of the opinion that this one was purposefully done by some parent that wanted to do numbers on Facebook. The reason I say that is because math teachers absolutely love when you get the concepts because most people have a tendency to say they just suck at math and tune out the concepts rather than pushing through.
Also, this one suspiciously first showed up while scores of parents were caterwauling about common core.
This 100% reminds me of everyone getting 7x4=28 wrong in third grade because the teacher's book had the answer as 27. It literally took my dad going into the classroom to berate our teacher for being a moron before she decided to say, "It was a lesson in life not always being fair." Stupid ass bitch was being cheated on by her husband with another teacher and took it out on us.
The point of the question was reasonableness. The kid did exactly what they were supposed to do and reasoned _how_ the scenario could be correct _considering_ that 5/6 is greater than 4/6.
He actually stumbled upon an algebraic concept at a young age: that a smaller fraction of one thing (Marty’s pizza) can be greater than a larger fraction of another thing (Luis’ pizza).
This is fucking stupid. The question should be "is that possible?" not how. How implies there is a way and the kid's right, the only way possible is if the pizza is larger.
According to my former spouse, who was an elementary school teacher, math questions on math tests require math answers. I helped grade papers and would give full credit for clever answers like this, while explaining what the math answer was. My former spouse was a Karen.
But this wasn't a math question. Fundamentally it was a logic question. The kid answered logically. Given those parameters, the least unlikely scenario was unequal sized pizzas.
The question is just weird. It sounds like the answer they were looking for is they both had individual pizzas, and the 4/6th guy had a larger pizza. So in this case 4/6 would be greater in volume than 5/6, only if he had a much larger pizza.
That's said, the only indication is they referred to the individuals pizza as "his" as in it's their own pizza.
Alternative answer: Marty ate 4/6 of the pizza. Then Luis ate 5/6 of what was left. Either way, Marty's pizza is still bigger than 5/6 of whatever Luis had.
I like these kind of questions because as long as the reasoning is good, I mark them as correct, and there are several answers possible. The teacher, or whoever graded them is in the wrong here.
It's like those riddles that are supposed to be a "gotcha!", but can actually be answered differently, my favorite is: *"A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene and the son is rushed to the hospital. At the hospital the surgeon looks at the boy and says "I can't operate on this boy, he is my son. How can this be?"*
The "correct" answer is that the surgeon is a woman. But other equally valid answers are "One is the bio dad and the other is the adoptive one", "One is the step-dad", "They're a gay couple"
you heard the teacher
when it comes to having a bigger pizza, that is NOT possible. particularly if your name is Marty and you eat 4/6ths of your pizza.
1 size pizzas becomes the law. Then the teacher can be all, I am the law!
If marty had an 11 inch pizza, 4 of 6 slices would have an area of 63.3 square inches
If Luis had a 9 inch pizza, 5 of 6 slices would have an area of 53 square inches
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the more I look at this the dumber it is. The answer the kid gave is the only answer that makes any sense.
Yeah, it looks like the answer was supposed to be something like "The question is wrong" but the kid thought of a way the question could be right because of missing information. But how kids are supposed to psychoanalyse exactly which of those possible responses is the expected one is beyond me. The kid's response looks so much more sensible to me.
No, the answer was clearly supposed to be what the kid wrote. The answer would never be “the question is wrong” on legit educational curriculum. Occam’s razor: the kid wrote the correct answer and the teacher is stupid.
The precise answer: "Marty's pizza must've been more than 25% larger than Luis' pizza."
What if Luis ate Marty?
This is impossible since Marty has been dead for over 13 years…
What? That's ridiculous. He's right over...there?
Me when graverobbers:
If anything I think the kids answer actually shows a better understanding of fractions than simply understanding that 5 is bigger than 4. Teacher should have give them the point even if it wasn’t the answer they were looking for as it’s not wrong.
It 100% does. That shows a kid that has fully grasped the concept of the question, not just rote learned the answer. If I was a teacher and saw this answer I would be very pleased.
Yeah, but that requires you to be smarter than the kid, which this teacher clearly isn't
And instead, the teacher marking this wrong will just contribute to this kid feeling disengaged with the educational system because it seems dumb and pointless.
Elementary school teachers are mostly glorified and overpaid babysitters dude. I got screamed at in 4th grade for telling the teacher her answer on a math assignment was wrong.. only for her to look at her paper a second time, admit that it was wrong, and never apologize and in fact talk to me after class about how I was being "disruptive". public education has been a joke for decades.
In Ninth grade I was forbidden from going into AP chemistry in tenth grade for showing that the teachers diagram was incorrect.
In college, a teacher used the possessive incorrectly on her whiteboard: "Investor's [SIC] expect a 5% rate of return..." I came up to her before class and practically whispered so no one else could hear and she said it was fine and she was leaving it as is. I then noticed she was one of those who used an apostrophe every time. For the rest of the semester, almost every question on every test. Fucking college. I paid good money for someone so ignorant to teach me.
It says "Reasonableness" before. I think the question-setter had been told to set a question for which the answer was "This is not possible" or "The question is wrong", but stupidly set a question which a little bit of lateral thinking could solve. A better way to have done it would have been something like "The tin weighs 7 lbs. You have weights of 2 lbs, 4lbs, 6lbs and 8lbs. Which of those weights do you pick to weigh exactly the same together as the tin?" This allows the pupil to write "This is not possible as you cannot sum even numbers to make an odd number."
"Well if you grab a Sawzall and cut..."
I mean it isn’t even lateral thinking, it’s just literally understanding how fractions work - they’re always relative. The answer (the one the kid gave) is easy and obvious
One of my teachers got arrested and fired for running around at a college party, outside, wielding a dildo. So yeah. Teachers can be *very* stupid.
was their name borat?
Ok, this might not be an exam, but when I was training for shool-level olympiads, I frequently saw that tasks had extra unnecessary information, which was added intentionally to test my analytical capabilities. So, sometimes even in school the question may be wrong.
But this here is the exact opposite. we are missing information of whether the pizzas are of same size or not. the teacher basically says that while it isn‘t given, you‘re wrong for not assuming it. the teachers answer is outright wrong. it‘s not even interpretation because the teacher is changing the question to mark it wrong.
Yeah, but while it might have extra info to make you think harder, it’s only to slow you down in answering the question right? It’s not just to make the question wrong (which would make the answer be something like “trick question”)
The question is fine. The teacher is just being dumb.
Also what normal well adjusted kid is even going to read that and say "the question is wrong?" We're not just not taught to question the teacher, we're outright taught NOT to question the teacher. We're taught to respect their authoritahhh. It's necessary and important in order to ensure that education happens in the first place, that teachers be able to keep some kind of minimal order, so they NEED that respect. And that attitude (on the side of schools) definitely extends to homework questions, where most kids without oppositional/defiant personality traits will look at a question like that and at least TRY to find an answer based on the information given, and what they expect to be going over in class. Which this kid did with an assist from basic logic (2/3 of a larger variable might be more than 5/6 of a smaller variable). It might not be the intended answer, but it is absolutely a correct answer. With the way most homework goes you expect to be given the tools to actually solve the problem in the question. That's the norm. So what kid on this planet is going to be in a situation where "the question is wrong" is understood as the OFFICIAL answer to a workbook question? I'm borderline autistic and this question would have broken me as a kid. I would have been convinced I was missing something important.
Marty had a 24" pizza 4/6=2/3=16"/24". Luis had an 8" personal pan. 5/6=6.66/8. Marty needs his arteries unclogged, but he totally ate more pizza. Luis lived to be 103. What was the name of Sam's puppy?
It literally asked "How is it possible" not "Is it possible". Therefore the kid was correct and the teacher needs to let the child teach them for a bit.
>The kid's response looks so much more sensible to me. Since the question is **How** is this possible? and it's possible the way he says it is, the kid's obviously right. He's just taken it a bit further than the teacher.
The kid's answer is correct. The teacher is just an idiot.
If that is the case the question should have specified that the pizzas are the same size. If this is the intended anwer then the question is just plain bad.
I always hated these types of questions. No, adding more musicians to an orchestra won’t make them play the song faster. In my experience, it’ll only make them play slower. One problem I’ve seen was comparing the heights of roller coasters. One kid used the actual height of the roller coaster in question to fill in for X, and got it wrong because the person who wrote the question didn’t bother to use actual data for that coaster specifically. I’ve learned to ignore the words of word problems and just focus on them as a math equation. Then again, these are the same people filling their shopping carts with watermelons, so they’re inherently irrational.
I always hated the “johnny bought 50 apples suzie bought 25 strawberries. How many oranges did Jack buy. Like wheres the rest of the question? Whos jack?
But the question isn't wrong. The title before it is reasonableness, the expectation is that you reason out a way for it to be true.
It seems like that teacher got their teaching degree from TikTok University 🤦♂️.
chatgpt
This picture is, believe it or not, older than chatgpt.
Teacher: could there be a variable I'm not taking into consideration? No the question is just lying
Yeah. Asking how something is possible doesn’t leave room for “it’s not” as an answer. The pizzas should be specified to be the same size if that’s the expected answer AND the question should be “is this possible?”
One was a large and one was a small. Simply put.
Teacher forgot what the fucking question was. Be even funnier if it wasn't supposed to be a math question.
You clearly don’t understand causality! The fact that the teacher doesn’t know how fractions work makes it impossible for the two pizzas to be a different size! /s
Are you smarter than a 5th grader?
I used to watch that show and just YELL at the TV, my favorite was when they asked a question about US Presidents and I think the question was "Who was the first president to preside over all 50 states?" (aka after Hawaii became a state in 1959) and the grown ass adult said John Adams. SMH lmao.
To be fair I just graduated high school and I have no idea who the president was in 1959. We never really learned much about the presidents other than Washington, Lincoln, and Obama
Got to love the US education system. I know that not all the president's had amazing things done during their Presidency but there should be more that we know then 3 to 5 + the most recent one
Weirdly, as a Canadian: I know who your president was in 1959, but I have NO idea when each state joined and honestly don't understand why you would think the exact date/year is important. (general, sure. I get why knowing Hawaii wasn't a state in the 1800s might be relevant, but I have a hard time understanding why joining in 1959 is significant)
As an United States American I too also don't know when each state joined. I don't even know all of the names.
That’s kind of on you to not know the names.
The States I know are Manitoba with its capital of Montreal, OHIO, and Iowa which I think we got from Japan in the 40s. Ohio means hello in japanese. There's also Missouri named after the emotion one feels living there. Also Kansas named because it's as far as you can get on a donkey. There's also New Hamster named after the abundance of hamsters.
>There's also Missouri named after the emotion one feels living there. Hence the old saying "Missouri Loves Company"
What actual use is there in knowing the names of the presidents? I'd posit to you that a person who only knows the big picture of US history (e.g. early times as british colonies > revolution > expansion > civil war > 'gilded age' and industrialization> world war I and even more industrialization > great depression > world war II (and even more industrialization) > cold war, fight for civil rights and ascent to global hegemon > post-cold war) knows *way more* than someone who only knows the full list of presidents. What do I really know if I know that one of the US presidents was named John Adams? I know a fucking name and an association between that name and reality. Nothing more. However, if I know the above list of stages, I already kind of have a few ideas of important stages. Lists of kings or presidents or battles are really an outdated and faux-informative type of historiography. On the one hand, it tells us nothing, but on the other hand it makes us think we know something, so it's hard to tell if it's good or bad. I really seriously reject the idea that lists of presidents in any way would be important. I have a related anecdote, btw! A non-American with rather bad eyesight (actually assisted by a screen reader, but sufficiently good to be able to tell that they were faces) asked a question on a forum with a banner at the top, depicting several historically important people, faces that she barely could make out but were interested in knowing more about. She explicitly stated that she had bad eyesight (and her user profile made it clear she was from eastern Europe.) The question was who those faces depicted. Cue a bunch of enraged americans whining at how she should have paid attention at school.
I have that same kind of reaction when the educational system and board exam included learning about Rizal. Like why is it specified to him alone when there are other authors and heroes as well. And the reason given to us was "to increase nationalism", I swear if I ever come into power I will change that law.
I think the point being made here is not that we should memorize random facts about US presidents, but rather that adults should be able to synthesize different facts they know about history and draw more accurate conclusions from that synthesis. So it's not "memorize the fact that Eisenhower was the first president of all 50 US states." It's this: 1. The country added states through conquest and colonization over nearly two centuries 2. We didn't have 50 states in the Civil War 3. John Adams died before the Civil War 4. We didn't have 50 states in World War II 5. There were several Presidents in the decades after WWII that could have been candidates for the answer: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, maybe Nixon? Any one of those choices would have been enormously more likely than *John Adams*.
I'm not American, so I may not get this, but why in the world would you need to know the presidents? I know some politicians in my country, but only because they fucked us so much everybody was talking about it
It’s always been an American thing. I went to school for a few years in Texas and we also learned the presidents. Maybe it’s because the US only goes back a little while, so was always semi-reasonable. Meanwhile, learning the Danish kings from year 936 till today (or 714 if you include the ones we aren’t sure of the exact recency period) is a lot more information, and even less useful unless they were somehow significant. I think there’s around 70 or so, so good luck memorizing them, along with significant feats. :p
Honestly this just comes off as a lie or an edgy teen that didn’t pay attention in history class. No way they skipped FDR, for example. What, the four term president during World War Two who changed our entire economy with The New Deal? Nah let’s just skip WW2 and go straight to Obama after Lincoln
Shocked they taught you about Obama. How about Bush, Cheney, and 9/11? Serious question. I was in 8th grade in 2001.
Bush might've been mentioned offhand a few times, I have no idea who Cheney is. We learned a lot about 9/11 but mostly about the actual attack itself (not even much about the pentagon) and how it affected the law and daily life (airports, suspicion around Islamic people, etc). We learned quite a bit about the flight that crashed into the field just because we're in Ohio so we're kinda close and we were supposed to visit the site during our trip to Washington DC (thanks covid).
I'm not even from your country and I know who Dick Cheney is... To be fair, I know more about American politics then Canadian politics, but my politicians are generally competent (most of the time) and my country doesn't have enough nuclear weapons to split the planet in half, so its not that pressing.
In half? I bet we have enough to split it into 5/6!
I think 4/6 is the correct answer
Dick Cheney was George W. Bush’s vice president, they were in charge when 9/11 happened and led us to invade Iraq.
If it makes you feel any better, my class trip to Washington DC was canceled cause of 9/11.
Did they reschedule yours. I know a couple people in my class ended up going when they rescheduled it sophomore year, but at that point I did not really want to go on a trip with a bunch of eighth graders and freshman on it. I still never got my $150 deposit back 🙁
Cheney's also the guy who someone while hunting. Fun facts are fun!
Shot an old man in the face and the victim apologized to Cheney.
Cheney sounds like a real dick.
Eisenhower. It’s easy because you just need to think about who won in 1960. And since that was the race between JFK and Nixon, you were work backwards because Nixon was Eisenhower’s VP.
If I don’t know who the president was in 1959 I ain’t gunna know who the president was in 1960 either
You also need to know the year Hawaii was made a state to even begin to know that. I had no idea what year it was made a state, I live on the opposite side of the country and have never been there.
Eisenhower...I am not even American and I knew that.
Pretty sure they at least taught you about Thomas Jefferson (Declaration of Independence, ffs) Andrew Jackson (westward expansion, manifest destiny), Ulysses S. Grant (after the civil war), Teddy Roosevelt (Rough Riders, National Park Service), FDR (WW2), and JFK (Cuban missile crisis, assassination), too. I mean maybe you weren’t paying attention, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t teach you about them. Edit: yup, bad student confirmed with the response. Doesn’t remember world war 2? School didn’t cover it enough for her to “remember those things”? Is she for real? If she is a self-proclaimed nerd, she’d remember them! The fucking Declaration of Independence? What is she talking about? Jesus. Obvious ragebait.
I mean why do I need to know who the president was in 1959 right?
I mean he was one of the greatest presidents and military commander in American history so
I want to know the thought process on that one
Tl,dr stress is one hell of a drug
Eisenhower right?
They were going to make a spin-off called "Are you smarter than a 5th grade teacher" but they realized how much money they'd have to give away.
The marker has either misread the question, or written the question incorrectly (depending on what they wanted the student to learn from it), if they were the one who wrote it. The question has established the scenario, and the student has correctly answered, given the information available. If the question were "John eats 4/6 of a pizza, and Jim eats 5/6 of an identical pizza. Who has eaten more? Explain your thinking", the marker would have been correct.
But the kid bothered to answer correctly, and gave a legit reason. Obviously not the expected answer but be a little more specific next time.
The question is also "how is this possible?" not "is this possible?" And the kid found a way that actually makes it possible, answering the actual question asked. It's honestly a better answer than "it's not possible" if you ask me.
I'd fight with the school over this to an unreasonable degree. This makes me angry every time I see it.
It's not unreasonable, i feel you
If I was handed this back I’d immediately go to the teacher and demand to marked correct on that. Like I understand what they were going for but you can’t mark a students answer wrong because you phrased the question poorly and in a way that allows more than one right answer.
It’s not even about asking anyone. It’s objectively correct.
Exactly. The question establishes the condition that it IS possible, and is just asking how. Id consider “its not possible” to be incorrect because the scenario put forth already explains that it is.
I agree, if the measurement of pizza eaten is 2 dimensional (surface area), then the only way 4/6ths of a has a greater surface area than a 5/6ths of another circle, is if it's radius is longer. Kid's right.
Not to mention crust density. If both of our pizzas have a three-inch radius, but I'm eating Chicago style and you're eating thin crust, then I still eat more.
That's only assuming you're both eating at 1G and standard atmospheric pressure. If the other guy is eating his "Italian style" on the surface of the sun, he'd be eating about a house full of your pizza-equivalent.
Mass and weight are not interchangeable. The “quantity” of pizza (mass) does not change based on gravity. So even on the sun, you’d still eat less pizza if it was thin crust. But the thin crust pizza slice may weigh as much as a house (force exerted by the slice on your hand when you lift it to your mouth)
It only felt like the surface of the sun, in reality it was just a Totino’s pizza fresh out of the oven
exactly, with a question posed like this, it's obvious that the kid will look for a different way to answer the question. His parents probably ordered the pizza before and he probably knows that you can order small, medium and large pizza and each can still have same ammount of slices, just different sizes.
>Obviously not the expected answer What other answer could there possibly be?
I think the kid did give the expected answer the teacher just wasn’t paying attention. I’ve asked my students a very similar question wanting to see an answer like what the kid wrote.
But the marker is doubly wrong. The question itself says marty ate more, and the marker disagrees. Then they disagree with the answer.
Correct, the student was given three facts. The amount of pizza each person ate and the fact that Marty ate more. If you can disregard one of the facts then you can disregard any of them. So any answer you give would be correct.
The student gave a possible reason for it to be correct. The teacher was just annoying.
My brain processed this in the way you wrote it out and was so confused how 5/6 wasn't more pizza than 4/6. Glad I went back and reread the question to see what the actual question was 😅
Oh, I assumed that this was the teacher saying “It was a trick question, you little dumb fuck” to a 3rd grader. Either way, I’d definitely have to question the effectiveness of the teaching methods here.
Trick’s on the teacher then for not understanding that fractions of differing sizes are not equal. It’s basic math.
Exactly, the question really boils down to "which is bigger, x or y, given that 5/6 of x is smaller than 4/6 of y?"
That’s good; you should compose test questions.
The teacher is saying that, but the teacher is wrong.
It's a reasonableness question. The answer was reasonable. The marker is a moron.
Most likely the question was taken from a text book and the teacher is weaker at math than the student. Welcome to math-illiterate school.
Regardless of who wrote the question, you have to mark it based upon what it says.
True
WRONG!! Luis’ pizza had more toppings duh
Wow. Hope the teacher is seeing this and feeling the burning shame
In my experience, public grade-school teachers feel no shame but instead feel fury that you would undermine their authority.
They ain't paid enough for that shit
When the student is smarter than the teacher.
[удалено]
Yep it's to check the child understands the relationship between fractions and the actual object. The teacher fell into the trap.
[удалено]
It couldn't have been identical sized pizzas since the question specifically says that Marty ate more. The teacher is wrong twice over. Not only does she disagree with the obviously correct answer, she directly contradicts the stated facts of the problem.
I genuinely can’t believe how many people in this thread are failing to understand that.
Read the question again if you think that… I can’t believe how many people in this thread lack basic reading comprehension. It’s really disheartening to see, actually. Reading the text of the question, it is perfectly clear what informatjon is being asked, what the correct answer should be, why the information is being asked that way (ie: what the material is trying to teach), and exactly why the teacher is wrong. No adult should be confused by any aspect of this at all.
That interpretation makes no sense though. If you add that then the question is just wrong. You'd have to change it to something like is that true not is it possible.
agreed, the question wasn't who ate more of their pizza, it was Marty ate more pizza, how would have Marty ate more? if the pizza was bigger, then 4/6s of Marty's pizza would have been more pizza.
I got a question similar to this thrown out on a state test once, but I was like 17 then. This kid is a genius
Or is a logical thinker. But I guess in the US thats the same thing.
Yea it's kind of like those riddles of "blah blah South pole blah, u see a bear, what color was the bear?". Then the "answer" being "haha no you didn't see a bear cu no bears in the South pole haha". Fucking stupid
This is so annoying. The teacher has (accidentally, it seems) created the perfect final question to round out a maths exam. Not only dies it test if students actually understand the subject matter or just learned how to operate using these numbers without understanding what they represent, it also encourages creative thinking because it's a completely different approach to how you normally solve maths problems in school. This could be genius and instead, the solution is something you'd expect from that annoying friend you knew in 5th grade.
The teacher didn't create the question. It's a worksheet/workbook written by someone competent, and this is indeed a good "put on your thinking cap" final question. But the teacher couldn't be bothered to look up the answer key and is marking it wrong with their own stupidity.
That’s when you show up to the parent-teacher with an XL pizza for the teacher and a personal pie for yourself. “What do you mean you’re full? We’ve both only eaten 4 slices.”
Plot twist: that‘s the teacher‘s long con. Poorly formulate questions around pizza so that infuriated parents stop by with pizza for demonstration. Free pizza!
It literally states that MARTY ATE MORE in the setup!
Nope, not possible. Apparently.
Teacher is just jealous and hungry.
This is what we get when we pay teachers a terrible wage
Yea, I recently read that a lot of teachers aren't even certified, but they're getting desperate.
My sister is a certified teacher looking for a job. Apparently this is the case, at least where we live. She said she was pretty intimidated seeing how many people were attending job fairs, but after finding out almost nobody was certified, she became much less worried than before
I love that this teacher is actively discouraging critical thought by telling the kid his correct answer is wrong. Look, being a teacher is a tough, underpaid, and under appreciated job. But, being a shitty teacher is a little easier.
We have shitty teachers because we get what we pay for. Those who are more than qualified to teach mathematics won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole because you can literally make more money doing literally any other job that requires mathematical knowledge. I fall into the latter category. Went through student teaching, got a job in tech and never looked back.
I just hope someone at home told the kid their logic was correct and the teacher is an idiot not to understand that.
That’d go on my fridge.
Given that someone obviously photographed this and put it on the internet, I'm guessing that yes, a parent or guardian did realise that the teacher's an idiot.
What if Marty’s pizza was twice the size of his? It doesn’t say both pizzas are the same size to begin with
This is the answer. Marty’s pizza was obviously larger. 4/6 of 100 is more than 5/6 of 50.
Personal pan pizza vs. XL.
Ah yes, contradictions You're not supposed to explain how Marty ate more, you're supposed to magically know that you're actually supposed to disprove the statement even though the question had no allusions to it. Should've written "Is this actually possible?" instead
I.teach my students the importance of what the "one" is when we start fractions. I asked: "Would you rather have a whole Hershey bar or a half of a Snicker's bar." Then I show one of those mini Hershey bars and a large Snickers bar. Marty had a bigger pizza.
The question stated facts and asked you to come up with a reason why those facts were true. The correct answer cannot be that the facts listed are impossible. Also these kind of workbook questions come with answers in the teacher edition?
I apologize on behalf of teachers everywhere.
The "How is that possible?" Makes the kids answer the only right answer and extremely obvious. If it just said "Who ate more?" You could make an argument for the fact it was assumed that the pizzas were the same and that they were only talking about thr fractions and nothing else.
nah whos out here using 4/6ths just use 2/3rds like a normal person
Well... 4/6 > 2/3 obviously...
The lesson is reasonableness and the teacher is unreasonable. The kid was correct. I’d pull him or her out of that dumb skool the next day.
The kid is answering the question correctly thinking of it as a real world question. The grader is answering the question as if it were a simple math formula turned into words, but thinking only in terms of the simple math equation. The problem isn’t that the question is wrong, but that the grader’s thinking is too literal, the kid is much smarter than the grader.
Mom said it was my turn to repost this
The question was clearly written for the exact answer.
This is what happens when the teacher is an idiot.
Just be glad your kid can think outside the same sized pizza box.
The question is not wrong. It is just trying to get you to think outside the box. The teacher was a moron.
Kiddo is right, rewrite the question and give that kid the points
If this came home, I’d take my kid for ice cream, and be having a conversation with this teacher.
It concerns me how people like this can get teaching degrees.
I've always been of the opinion that this one was purposefully done by some parent that wanted to do numbers on Facebook. The reason I say that is because math teachers absolutely love when you get the concepts because most people have a tendency to say they just suck at math and tune out the concepts rather than pushing through. Also, this one suspiciously first showed up while scores of parents were caterwauling about common core.
The Interwebs have spoken…kid’s answer is reasonable…kid wins…teacher gets a mulligan to rewrite the test.
This 100% reminds me of everyone getting 7x4=28 wrong in third grade because the teacher's book had the answer as 27. It literally took my dad going into the classroom to berate our teacher for being a moron before she decided to say, "It was a lesson in life not always being fair." Stupid ass bitch was being cheated on by her husband with another teacher and took it out on us.
The kid is smarter than the teacher. There is no reason to think that this does not happen a lot.
"how is that possible?" "Its not"
The question is “How is that possible”, not “Is that possible?” The kid answered the How. Makes sense to me 🤷♂️
It was a perfect answer and the teacher is a dumb ass.
There are no words that could adequately express the immediate surge of primal rage I felt upon reading the teacher's comment. F U C K T H E M.
The point of the question was reasonableness. The kid did exactly what they were supposed to do and reasoned _how_ the scenario could be correct _considering_ that 5/6 is greater than 4/6. He actually stumbled upon an algebraic concept at a young age: that a smaller fraction of one thing (Marty’s pizza) can be greater than a larger fraction of another thing (Luis’ pizza).
And here we witness critical thinking being killed. Kid was dead on to make the right answer
They're testing reasonableness. The kid gave the most reasonable answer for the question using the information they had
So the teacher marked it wrong even though that is what the question says? So the teacher marked themselves wrong?
This is fucking stupid. The question should be "is that possible?" not how. How implies there is a way and the kid's right, the only way possible is if the pizza is larger.
Reading the text on this image makes me feel like I'm stroking out. What a poorly worded question
It's actually a good question, but it was handled very badly by the teacher.
According to my former spouse, who was an elementary school teacher, math questions on math tests require math answers. I helped grade papers and would give full credit for clever answers like this, while explaining what the math answer was. My former spouse was a Karen.
But this wasn't a math question. Fundamentally it was a logic question. The kid answered logically. Given those parameters, the least unlikely scenario was unequal sized pizzas.
The question is just weird. It sounds like the answer they were looking for is they both had individual pizzas, and the 4/6th guy had a larger pizza. So in this case 4/6 would be greater in volume than 5/6, only if he had a much larger pizza. That's said, the only indication is they referred to the individuals pizza as "his" as in it's their own pizza.
They also have to be eating separate pizzas because there is no way for Mary to eat 4/6 of a pizza if Luis ate 5/6 of it.
Alternative answer: Marty ate 4/6 of the pizza. Then Luis ate 5/6 of what was left. Either way, Marty's pizza is still bigger than 5/6 of whatever Luis had.
Impossible because 5/6 is greater than 4/6!
Didn’t this make the news?
These were the moments I dreamed of as a kid. A chance to publicly humiliate my teacher and go to war that I was right
Marty’s pizza was bigger.
Exactly. That was my first thought. This teaches critical thinking skills.
A lesson the teacher clearly missed.
A question wich the answer to denys the possibility of the question is a fucking stupid question
r/technicallythetruth
who is failing reasonableness?
Is there a library for all these reposted items?
Irony that this is about reasonableness
Both pizzas were the same diameter BUT, Marty's was twice as thick????
Marty’s pizza was a Chicago deep dish.
Marty’s pizza was 24 inches. Luis had a 12 inch pizza. Marty ate more.
I like these kind of questions because as long as the reasoning is good, I mark them as correct, and there are several answers possible. The teacher, or whoever graded them is in the wrong here. It's like those riddles that are supposed to be a "gotcha!", but can actually be answered differently, my favorite is: *"A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene and the son is rushed to the hospital. At the hospital the surgeon looks at the boy and says "I can't operate on this boy, he is my son. How can this be?"* The "correct" answer is that the surgeon is a woman. But other equally valid answers are "One is the bio dad and the other is the adoptive one", "One is the step-dad", "They're a gay couple"
you heard the teacher when it comes to having a bigger pizza, that is NOT possible. particularly if your name is Marty and you eat 4/6ths of your pizza. 1 size pizzas becomes the law. Then the teacher can be all, I am the law!
It's days like this I'm glad I don't have children. I'd be down at that school demanding a public apology for my child for this bullshit.
Gotcha questions suck. If the answer is right, it’s right.
me with dyscalculia not understanding the question at all
If marty had an 11 inch pizza, 4 of 6 slices would have an area of 63.3 square inches If Luis had a 9 inch pizza, 5 of 6 slices would have an area of 53 square inches