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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
I worked there before a few years ago so I may be a little inaccurate, but somewhere in the realm of 18"-22".
They are massive, definitely bigger than your usual pizza delivery box/bag
When I was in elementary, my teacher said that “Lutetia” was how the Romans called the city of Liege. As an avid reader of Asterix comics, I knew this isn’t true and corrected her and said it was the Roman name of Paris. She insisted that it is Liege. Anyway, the next day, she came back to class and said that she looked it up and that I was indeed correct and Lutetia referred to Paris and gave me a chocolate bar and told me to keep reading comics. Good teacher.
In my country, the written final exams include a Q&A section in the beginning of the test, where the teacher and the headmaster are present, and where they present the tasks and students are allowed to ask questions. After that section, the headmaster leaves and students and teachers aren’t allowed to talk for the rest of the test.
I noticed a missing specification in one of the tasks. It was a 3D geometry task, and it was missing one angle, thus allowing for infinite correct results. During the Q&A section I asked about that, and my teacher looked sternly past me to the end of the room and said “I am sure the specifications are correct”. If there was an actual error in the specifications, the whole test would have been voided and would have to be repeated at a later date, for all the students attending.
As soon as the headmaster was out of the room, he came to me and asked where he made the mistake. He then wrote a fitting spec on the whiteboard.
I liked that guy. He was a good teacher.
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.
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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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.
What do you mean someone else? Who doesnt?
An animated miniseries came out this year too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_and_Obelix%253A_The_Big_Fight
Why would you ask “How is this possible” when you expect the answer to be “it’s not”?
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!
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.
