First grade math question

10 frames are introduced in Kindergarten.

Is there a one-click link to the problem?- I’m running into stuff that I don’t know how to get past, and I have had to base my replies on inference from others.

That is a one-click link to the problem. There’s a bunch of other junk that shows up on the page, but the problem is there.

Wendell Wagner writes:

> the_diego, please be more careful about quoting people. In post #44, you quoted a sentence from the test as if I wrote it.

the_diego quoted you from your post in post 8, please be more careful of your accusations of others.

Think of it like a clinical trial. If I want to show that my drug that lowers blood pressure works, I have to test everyone’s blood pressure before, and then test it after. Without that initial test, I can only guess how effective the drug is. With the full data, I am able to not just see that it leads to improvements, but also compare it to what other people are doing, run statistical analysis, compare results across years, etc.

Thank you for replying, but with my PC the image of the problem is not there in one click.

One click gets me to a site called “tinypic” there is a menu bar near the top with a button that has “images” on it. Clicking that button gets me to a screen where I can browse several pages of images; the OP problem is not on the first page.

What’s with the interrogation? None of it bears on the question. Somebody who actually works in math education has verified that this is typical first grade math, even if it’s not familiar to us old timers, so I humbly suggest you drop the browbeating.

If both of these links don’t work, I’ll email you the image:

http://oi64.tinypic.com/2evdcf8.jpg

Imgur

This feels like one of those viral things where parents (and non-parents) complain about how terrible some “commom core” [sic] math problem is, when it’s really not that hard, and (as many people in this thread have said) tries to teach kids logical mental processes instead of hardwiring the traditional addition/subtraction “carry the one” type processes we learned. I always find them interesting and kind of cool because once I get past the unfamiliar language, I realize, this is how I actually do math in my head, which I felt like was cheating. I think it’s cool that they are teaching kids those tricks now. Unfortunately reason travels at a tenth the speed of outrage.

Cheating which works reliably is the whole point of math. The best mathematicians are the ones who come up with ways to cheat at entire sub-fields and/or elaborate on some form of cheating until it is a whole new sub-field.

I always thought they should teach linear algebra in high school; the way it allows you to cheat at elementary school algebra is breathtaking, which is why it’s one of the most practically useful fields of mathematics. One of the most important parts of physics is finding a good way to at least approximate your sub-field’s relevant equations such that linear algebra applies to them; once you’ve done that, the opportunities to cheat just open right up.

Thanks very much- both of those links get me image.

This thread is a lot more interesting than it would seem on the surface. Intrigue, mystery, suspense!

Not to mention paranoia

SERIOUSLY THOUGH WHO GAVE YOU THAT TEST QUESTION???

obligatory lower case letters

Yes, I was able to figure out they wanted 15-5-2. And no, it’s not hard. But if I’m perfectly honest, reading that question kind of pisses me off. To make a ten, what does that even mean? To make a ten? It’s wasted effort and not everyone’s brain works that way. Why not make a twelve? Why not go 15-3-4?

Presumably, if you were in the test’s intended audience, you’d know what it means:

[QUOTE=Barkis, continued]
It’s wasted effort and not everyone’s brain works that way. Why not make a twelve? Why not go 15-3-4?
[/QUOTE]
What are you saying: that kids shouldn’t be taught any specific method, because no matter how you teach them, “not everyone’s brain works that way”? Or that kids should only be taught what you, personally, are used to doing?

I read somewhere that we use a base ten number system.

I personally stole it from the Department of Education’s secret underground “First Grade Pre-Test” vault and beamed it out to a fewselect people via a number of SETI arrays so as to undermine the basic fabric of American society. X-Ray Vision was obviously one of my unwitting pawns who received the stolen test-question. The collapse of democracy itself now looms large.

Drunky Smurf, the_diego quoted my quote from x-ray vision. He made it look like I was the one who originally said the quote. I wasn’t.

tnetennba and Fenris, I was trying to figure out how x-ray vision got hold of the test. As I said in post #31, it sounds from what x-ray vision has said that his friend got the test because the friend’s child brought the test home because the students were expected to bring it home. In post #34, Chronos suggested several other ways that the friend could have gotten the test. I want to know how the friend got the test. If the teacher used the test (which, again, was given at the beginning of first grade) merely to find out if any of the students knew of this mathematical technique (which, again, was only going to be taught later in the first grade) before that student entered the first grade, then the teacher should never send the test home with the student. This would be like the teacher, at the beginning of the school year, giving all the students a test of their reading level which included some questions which assumed a reading level far beyond that of the average student, and then the teacher sends the test with the student’s answers home to the parents.

You never send such a test (which merely lets a teacher know if any students already know all the material that they will be learning later in the year) home for the parents to see. That’s none of the parents’ business. The only reason that you let a parent see a test is to let them know what the student is currently learning. If you give the parent a test which is about material that the students will only learn months later, you are unnecessarily worrying the parents. They will ask their children, “What does this material in the test mean?” The child will say, “I don’t know. The teacher hasn’t taught us any of this. I don’t know why they put it on the test. Nobody in the class even understood the questions.” You don’t ever make the parent think that their child is being asked about things they haven’t been taught yet.

That’s utter nonsense. As I said up thread, we saw all the kids baseline work and their progress work over the whole year. Teachers don’t keep secrets from parents about their children’s academics.

Where do you get such a notion?

And you want to know what the child says “it’s a pretest mom so the teacher knows what we need to learn”. You think they keep secrets from the kids, too?