Kid gave a reasonable answer without all the math bullshit

https://lemmy.world/post/30696155

It is entirely possible and his answer was correct.

A third option is that there is a third pizza eater who also ate 4/6th of their pizza and gave 2/6th up Marty in exchange for the 2/6th Marty didn’t eat.

Or yeah maybe it was a larger pizza.

Not only that, the two statements in the premise are simply given. How is the child to know one of them is false? At that point, why not say Marty ate more than Luis and therefore the fractions must be different? Maybe the fractions are wrong and Marty ate more.

Just an absolutely terrible question if that’s supposed to be the answer. I’d guess the teacher didn’t write the question and didn’t understand the answer.

Take that to the principal, stupid teachers shouldn’t teach

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.

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 unconstitutional, 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.

… or have a bit of empathy and talk to the teacher like a human.
Tge principal is not necessarily any smarter than the teachers. Often it’s the opposite.
The teacher is the one who’s confused here. The kid is entirely correct.
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.
There’s nothing wrong with the answer.
Cancel that teachers staff pizza party in lieu of a payrise pass.
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!

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.

This happens all the time, at least in Germany. My teachers did it, and I do it too.

The picture is probably still ragebait.

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
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.

In the USA maybe, teachers in Germany are paid quite well

Still, here in France it’s fairly common to hear people teachers are lazy because they have a lot of vacations. In reality they do work more than many other jobs it’s just that they get a lot of “homework”.

My mom was every evening working at least 2 hours and that’s just after work. And as the head of school you already have to leave late your job. So if that’s just a chill job why isn’t more people going for it? It’s because it’s badly paid on top of long hours that can be very exhausting with kids. Also it’s a lot of responsibility to handle to just be in charge of so many children at a time.

So basically, I’m the son of a teacher, I love sharing knowledge but there is no way I will even try to do this job. Well at least not before exhausting most of the other options.

Just think about where you will be in life without going to school. I don’t think my life would be half as comfortable if a succession of teachers taught me how to learn, how to behave socially, how to share, how to argument, how to create…

Right now a lot of countries are beefing up their military and it’s often at the expense of the schools/teachers… Which make me really sad. I expect teachers to be less skilled as time passes simply because there won’t be much people to accept that kind of job so only the “worse” teachers will get it.

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.

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

Can’t speak for anyone else.

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.

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 they spent an entire math class period earlier that week explaining to the students what "reasonableness" was going to mean on their next math test, and in the context of (I'm guessing 3rd or 4th grade) arithmetic the important thing they're trying to teach is that 5/6 is a larger fraction than 4/6. I agree that the question could be worded better (change the last two sentences to "Marty says he ate more pizza. Is this possible?") but I strongly suspect that the missing context from their class - or maybe even at the beginning of the test - explains enough to get the answer the teacher was looking for here.

Yes, one kid starting with a larger pizza changes the situation, but fundamentally that's an algebra question, not a "learning fractions" question.

Well yes it is a learning fractions question. Pizza is not a number. Pizza is not a specification of size. It is absolutely crucial for understanding fractions, that a fraction of anything but two numbers will be factored by the size or whatever metric of that thing.

In the same wake you learn that “5” is not an answer to a typical physics calculation, as the unit is missing.

We can understand the context of the curriculum goals and still realize that the question was asinine and the teacher is a dipshit.
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.
It’s reffering to the answer of the child, not the math question.

Because the teacher is wrong and it’s an idiotic question.

The question asks the child to explain how Marty ate more pizza than Louis. “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 Louis 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 Louis’s smaller pizza.

The question should have been “Marty ate 4/6 of a pizza and Louis ate 5/6 of a pizza. Explain who ate more pizza.”

So…

(4/6)m >= (5/6)l m >= (5/4)l

Which means Marty’s pizza is one and a quarter the size of Luis’ pizza. We can comfortably just compare the area, since we can assume a flat disk with equal height for a pizza.

Assuming Luis’ pizza is a Domino’s Classic size of 25cm that’s an area of:

(25cm / 2)² * π = (625cm² / 4) * π = 490.874cm²

So Marty’s pizza should be at least 490.874cm² * 1.25 = 613.5925cm² for 4/6 of his to be greater or equal of 5/6 of Luis’, so:

sqrt(613.5925cm² / π) * 2 = 13,975426964cm * 2 = 27,950853929cm

Since Marty’s pizza is equal or greater, let’s go with 28cm diameter… which happens to match exactly a Domino’s Medium size.

That’s a very realistic scenario and the teacher is an absolute idiot for not understanding.

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.
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 Forbe list and brought it in. The teacher coped by saying that if you combined the Walton wealth, it would rank that high. He was a POS teacher for more significant reasons than that though.

I once got in trouble with my math teacher for saying “well if we’re just making things up, then sure [I cheated on a math test while sitting in the front of class where the teacher can see but I was using some kind of hidden code on my t-shirt that was a bunch of Shakespearean insults] . But what about all that Crack you were doing in your car this morning?”

Apparently my "making things up"was a slightly more serious than his. I stand by it. If we’re making shit up, we’re making shit up.

For the record, this geometry teacher was convinced I was cheating in class because I didn’t do homework. Homework was 5% of the final grade for the year according to his syllabus, I hated homework, so I figured as long as I didn’t suck at the rest of the class, I could do 0 homework and pass. I was right, passed with a 94%

In 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. Instead the teacher came back at me quite snarky and said it’s much easier to do “IIMM”, just substract 2 from 2000, duh!

It was only years later when I accidently learned that he was indeed full of shit and I was right all along.

It would’ve been easier to pretend it was 2000 and just write MM
I’m pretty sure people would have caught on to pretending it was two years in the future :)

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

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

  • 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

  • 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.

    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.
    Astérix was also popular in Québec in the same way.
    What do you mean someone else? Who doesnt?

    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.

    haha, I also got some points in school for knowing that Lutetia is Paris, which I also found out by reading Asterix
    Dang, in which country are you talking about Liège in elementary school?
    Germany. IIRC the topic was Romans, not Liege specifically.
    Some real “steel is heavier than feathers” energy coming off this teacher.
    Limmys Show: Whats heavier a kilogram of steel or a kilogram of feathers

    Comment what you thought was heavier at first😂

    YouTube

    I know this is bait but who said they had the same-sized pizzas?

    One could be XL the other one a personal pizza.