Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit

it’s much easier to just substract 2 from 2000, “IIMM” duh!

For anyone wondering why this is wrong, there are two reasons:

1. 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
2. The subtractions only generally allowed one symbol to be subtracted, with a few notable exceptions like XIIX for 18 and XXIIX for 28

It would've been easier to pretend it was 2000 and just write MM

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%

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.

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?

Germany. IIRC the topic was Romans, not Liege specifically.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was told in 6th or 7th grade science class that you can't hear underwater

Ohio resident for grade school, they did it at 4 different school districts across every grade.

Can't speak for anyone else.

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.

With the choice of marker, I'd say its rage bait.

"Under-qualified" for the class? Are we really setting the bar beneath the level of a grade schooler?

Not true. Marty could have also eaten pizza that was not his.

I was once called down to the principal’s office and told I would be expelled from my Catholic school because in spite of my catholic upbringing, I was an atheist (in the US, at a time when this was obviously illegal, given that the school accepted non catholic students of other religions). They called my dad and had me wait in the hall outside the principal’s office. For context, my dad’s an agnostic who doesn’t harbor any positive views towards the Catholic Church, but is a huge fan of educators and would always side with the teacher, no matter how unfair they were being.

My dad went straight in without acknowledging me and spoke with them inaudibly for about a minute, before the secretary came out and sent me back to class. I never heard anything about it from the school again and when my dad got home, he just said I didn’t need to worry about it. Decades later, he still won’t tell me exactly what happened, but I honestly think he might have forgotten and doesn’t want to admit it.

Das ist echt krass xD Dein Papa hat vollkommen Recht

Yeah, that was my point. If everything the question says is true, the only way 4/6 is more amount pizza than 5/6, is that the first one is a bigger pizza. The kid not only understood the logic with fractions and the problem statement, but came up with a really good answer. You can even calculate how much bigger the pizza is.

Teachers accepting only "the right answer" without pondering that kind of thinking, are really just damaging kids. Straight to the gulag.

"Reasonableness" as the heading implies that they've been working on whether a word problem makes any sense at all. It's, perhaps ironically, an attempt to help them build critical thinking skills. Then, elementary school teachers are not all brilliant minds themselves, and even the ones who are incredibly gifted educators are overworked, and their schools are generally underfunded. You get a cheap resource, maybe even a free one, or one your former mentor threw together late one night three years ago, and you can end up with a sloppy question. If you yourself are having a bad moment, or are not particularly talented, or the kid is a known shitass, then yeah, you could overreact and respond like this.

Having just sat with my kid through a year of 5th grade math homework, it is completely plausible that this is a real quiz and a real response. Some of the question writing even in the professionally made materials is just not good, partly because it presumes a laser focus on a single "instructional variable," despite mandates to teach holistically.

They're not on about the kids answer. They're talking about the teacher saying Luis ate more. How? It literally says in the question Marty ate more.

Marty ate more than Luis, that was she lie, in the problem not the answer. That's if the teacher is saying the answer isn't right.

That's not what it is, no.

Teachers make mistakes, like any human being, and a good teacher can deal with the fact that they made a mistake and that a student found said mistake.

A teacher who insists on being right over being correct is a bad teacher, because a teacher is supposed to teach a child understanding and knowledge, not blind obedience above anything else.

That's how you end up with a population who agree with the leader even if he tells them the sky is green.

Honestly I suspect the question was phrased poorly. It should have simply said "who ate more pizza" not stated who ate more and request to explain how

No, the kid's answer is not "just as right", it is the correct and expected answer. The teacher's answer is wrong and proof the teacher doesn't understand the question. The entire point of the question is understanding that fractions of a whole are relative to that whole and you can't directly compare fractions from different wholes like that. 5/6 > 4/6 doesn't mean Luis ate more pizza than Marty, it means Luis ate a larger share of his pizza than Marty ate out of his own.

But... The teacher is just flat-out wrong. It says right there in the problem that Marty ate more, and then uses that fact as a foundation for the question of "x is true, HOW can x be true". It'd be different if the question was "someone claims x is true; is it?"

The kid actually answered the question. The teacher's expected response is basically "no, your question is wrong and I refuse to answer it."

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.

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.

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.

But those things stick. I did a geography test 35 years ago and wrote Canada instead of Kanada wich which is the correct spelling in German. In the eyes of my teacher I answered the question wrong and didn't get the point, but I also got a point deducted because I did a spelling error. I didn't lose trust in teachers or society in general, but this still nags me. :)

You are massively not comprehending how a child thinks.

Which the teacher failed (assuming this is real)

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.

We're in the cursed timeline where Carlin didn't lead the second American revolution.

Real talk though, it's because we don't have an education system, we've got a babysitting system. POSIWID.

Thats an awfuly convenient incompetence for the ruling class then.

Also, I dont know how things are where you live, but here in méxico we keep hearing, year after year, how topics and subjects are removed from school plans. Seems like a very obvious effort to "teach less" every year.

No. See sibling comment where I linked to George Carlin.

If I were an overworked teacher, I'd still rather award the point. Just throw down a checkmark and move on. I don't need to write an explanation, and the kid/parents are not going to complain.

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.

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

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.

Or even a step further, the measurement is in volume not area. This could be a Chicago style pizza where 1 slice equals 2 slices of New York style.

And it’s not even some crazy stretch to make the premises work. Like if it had said the pizzas are the same size, I’d have to try to come up with something ridiculous to meet the requirements of the question, and would probably just leave it blank. But people order different sized pizzas every day.

The “correct” answer contradicts the requirements set out in the question.

Am I autistic? Or do I just have basic reading comprehension?

If the “correct” answer is valid, so is “actually neither of these people exist”, because we clearly aren’t expected (or allowed!) to accept the premises for sake of argument.

I’m not autistic but agree that the kid gave the correct answer and the teacher is wrong.

If that had happened to my kid the teacher and I would have had at least one meeting.