This brings back memories of when I realized that I was smarter than most of my teachers.
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?)
Man, if you can’t understand fractions, you don’t actually understand the math, you’re just trained to use a formula.
I understand fractions, I simply doubt their utility.
Saying shit like that implies you don’t really get that they are the same thing.
Hate to break it to you but anything less than a whole is a fraction of a whole thing. Decimals, too, are bits of a whole.
For example, they allow you to write
1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1
Which is not possible in decimal
well, no, it’s understood that a third is .333 to infinity, so .333+.333+.333 does equal 1 for any use not requiring precision to the point of it mattering that it was actually .33333335 when measured.
No. You wrote .333
If you want to precisely write to infinity you write 1/3.
actually .33333335
Holy fuck. Where did that 5 come from?
It came from it not being actually .333 to infinity when measured in the required engineering precision i was talking about. It’s literally a “common use” mathematical convention (you clearly are unaware of) that three times .333 is one. Solves a lot of problems due to a failure of the notation.
3 times 0.333 is 0.999 not 1.
Saying it equals 1 may be a common engineering convention, but it is mathematically incorrect.
There is no failure of notation if fractions are used, which is why I gave this example of usefulness.
Tf you mean?? You can write it in a repeating decimal as
0.333....using ellipsis. https://wiki.froth.zone/wiki/Repeating_decimalSo you think
0.333.... + 0.333.... + 0.333.... = 1Is clearer and more concise than
1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1
Fractional representation is the method for rational numbers, particularly if they are part of an intermediate calculation.
Decimals are lossy, fractions aren’t.
No because you said this:
If you want to precisely write to infinity you write 1/3.
You can also precisely write to infinity if you write 0.333…
Decimals are lossy, fractions aren’t.
Decimals aren’t lossy, any fraction can be converted to decimal but it just takes longer to write.
The fraction 1/3 is a compact and unambiguous representation—it doesn’t rely on an ellipsis or an understanding of infinite series to be interpreted. It can easily be used in later calculations (you never see … notation in algebra). It is a useful notation.
As soon as you use decimals in computer and human calculations, they become lossy.
I’m not really sure what hill you are trying to die on. Fractions are useful, even if you don’t know how to use them.
The higher the level of the course I was taking, the less test markers cared about the actual final answer. If you used the correct equations, simplifying the final answer to a faction rather than a decimal or leaving constants like pi and e in there was good enough for full marks.
Generally more accurate, too, because you’re not rounding the number but leaving it as the true value because 1/3 != 0.333333. It’s better to do it this way if there’s multiple steps, too, since you can gather or cancel out like terms if you leave them as variables instead of converting and rounding to some decimal.
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who says, 5/6 is easy to mentally understand than 0.83־.
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is a reasonable way to start thinking about arithmetics, and basically to start doing simple math IMO.
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People have already commented on fractions, there’s a lot of math that is way easier to keep accurate by leaving in fractional form as it goes.
For word problems, done correctly, the math is pointless if you can’t map it to more realistic scenarios. In terms of applying math to the real world, it’s supremely rare that the world just spits out the equation ready for you to solve, the ability to distill a scenario described by prose to a mathemetical solution is critical. Problem is when they are handled incorrectly and have ambiguous solutions or parameters, but dealing with kids’ homework, this is pretty rare, though it’s admittedly utterly infuriating when it comes up.
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.
Or just say 33%?
In many cases that’s fine, I’ve done so regularly. But when you want to be precise without making it complicated you can just say the fraction as well. But in order to do that you need people to feel comfortable with it, therefore we need to teach kids this from a young age. I’m not saying we always need them, but they’re definitely very useful tools that you want at the ready when you need them. To make quick calculations in your head it’s often way simpler to use the fraction than the real number. And in cases like 1/3rd or 3/7ths it’s a way simpler, accurate and more efficient way to communicate the number than to name the rounded number.
At least where I am from we do get fractions in school.
Most people here will say “een derde” aka a 3rd, but it is mostly not used as a precise measurement or anything. Something like 3/7th is rarely used andd we would say 42,9%. In cases where the differences that create are relevant we would communicate it on paper or digitally where iirc we would still use percentages or decimals. Then again I am an accountant and not a technical analysist or anything. For me the difference between 42,9% and 42,85714 will mean a couple thousand at most.
Doesn’t imperial metrics also use frations from time to time? Metric doesn’t do that, but we have things like nanometers etc.
I’m also Dutch so I don’t have the answers about the imperial system haha
33.33333333333…%, you mean?
In 99/100 of the situations people do not care about you saying 33% instead of 1/3 or 33,3333333333% or 33,33…%
Shocking twist: boldly estimating 99/100 of situations is less accurate (more hyperbolic) than asserting 33% or ⅓ or whatever is accurate.
It’s not about accuracy especially not when TALKING to somebody. I work with numbers for a living and nobody is as obsessed with fractions than people on Reddit and Lemmy, it’s crazy and I have clients where the difference between 33,33% and 33% can be thousdands of euro’s.
reasonableness
Every time this gets reposted, everyone misses this first word.
This isn’t a maths question.
It’s asking the student to read the question and make an observation if it’s a reasonable question and answer.
And with the information provided it’s not.
I’m sorry, what? There is precisely nothing unreasonable about this question. It has a correct answer that can be found with basic logic
But it’s perfectly reasonable for Marty to order the bigger pizza because he is a greedy bastard.
Take that to the principal, stupid teachers shouldn’t teach
… or have a bit of empathy and talk to the teacher like a human.
Reminds me of the time when I got send to the principle for saying “fuck you” during class. I was saying it to a classmate, but the teacher felt it was directed at her.
Anyway, the principle (herself a German teacher, this happend in Germany) gave me detention and wrote a letter to my parents, saying it was because I made a sexist remark towards a teacher.
My Dad wrote back explaining the difference between a sexist and an obscene remark. They canceled my detention and I never heard about it again.
Das ist echt krass xD Dein Papa hat vollkommen Recht
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.
The principal is not necessarily any smarter than the teachers. Often it’s the opposite.
Some real “steel is heavier than feathers” energy coming off this teacher.
Your fault for not listing the size and list of toppings for both pizzas, one could be a small personal pizza size with just cheese and pepperoni and the other a full huge New Yorker sized one with double of everything.
Shit, pne was probably a pizza bagel and the other a Pizza Hut Bigfoot.
Just to prove the point in an absurd way.
Or even a step further, the measurement is in volume not area. This could be a Chicago style pizza where 1 slice equals 2 slices of New York style.
The statement and question make perfect sense. The kid has the only “reasonable” answer.
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
Maybe it’s not smaller, just farther away?
Reminds me of the Homestar Runner one where Marzipan kept saying this the whole episode.
I see you noticed that too ;)
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
correct fraction = 4/5, as in, Luis’ pizza is smaller than the 4/5 (80%) of Marty’s pizza.
Well the question does assign ownership to the pizza, so Marty can eat his pizza then give it to Luis making it his pizza
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”.
Neither is right: written text is not people, and text without people is either right or wrong until someone read. Only people reading can make the text true, also, you’re a moron.
…it’s just a joke, jeeeez.
There’s nothing wrong with the answer.
Teachers that don’t accept an unexpected but true answer are not teaching. The test taker had a correct take, one of the pizzas could be bigger than the other. It was not specified in the question. I am so glad I am out of school
It really seemed like my fellow students lost their interest in math as we went through the grades here in the US.
I still remember a kid in 2nd grade who learned how Roman numerals worked because they were interesting. By grade 6, actively detested math.
Curious.
Kid should’ve gotten half credit at the very least.
This answer shouldn’t have been unexpected, seeing as how it’s the correct answer.
The test key has the expected answer, which may even be wrong. If the test taker responds with something else, even if it solves the problem, it is not the expected answer. It’s stupid.
This is genuinely baffling. What was that teacher on.
Why would you ask “How is this possible” when you expect the answer to be “it’s not”?
Because they spent an entire math class period earlier that week explaining to the students what “reasonableness” was going to mean on their next math test, and in the context of (I’m guessing 3rd or 4th grade) arithmetic the important thing they’re trying to teach is that 5/6 is a larger fraction than 4/6. I agree that the question could be worded better (change the last two sentences to “Marty says he ate more pizza. Is this possible?”) but I strongly suspect that the missing context from their class - or maybe even at the beginning of the test - explains enough to get the answer the teacher was looking for here.
Yes, one kid starting with a larger pizza changes the situation, but fundamentally that’s an algebra question, not a “learning fractions” question.
We can understand the context of the curriculum goals and still realize that the question was asinine and the teacher is a dipshit.
I agree that the idea they were teaching was “is it reasonable for 4/6 to be larger than 5/6”, but it was too sloppy to be in a word problem with cultural context. Sometimes if you’re the teacher and a kid stumbles onto a loophole this big, you have to take the L and update your materials for the next year. Just add, “Marty and Luis ordered small pizzas at Joe’s,” and this goes away. This feels like the question writer had been in a groove with drafting more abstract problem sets, and didn’t do a good job when shifting gears into the word problem section.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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.”
I have an argument like that in my calculus 1 class in college, it was an optimization problem but the professor never said that the optimization variable was a constant, so you couldn’t differentiate it to zero and do the normal process that you typically do. So I just wrote that given that the perimeter wasn’t a constant the area to optimize goes to infinite Givin x -> inf; y -> 0, without loss of generality. He marked me zero we discussed about it and I said that I don’t care because I’m going to get a 10 next test if he didn’t fucked up the question. At the next exam I made some stupid error but he still gave 9/10 for the overall class because he came to accept that he wrote the question wrong and I was the only in the class actually caring and giving the class some dedication.
