50 posts and no one asked “deep-dish, thin crust, massive extra cheese, or ‘That Horrific 80s Style Dominoes’…?”
Teacher should always take good care of testees, whether they’re their own or testees they’re handling for someone else. Tweaking them is liable to make them sensitive, and leading them down a false path can be very hurtful indeed. There are few things worse than testees with their lines crossed, and they shouldn’t get the dirty end of the stick, either.
Maybe we should get bagel dogs, instead.
I would propose this simple test for the teacher:
Bill Gates gives 4/6 of his wealth to person A.
The homeless guy on the corner gives 5/6 of his wealth to person B.
Obviously the teacher will choose to be person B and get more cash, right? I’ll be person A.
I also regard this story with some skepticism. First, the source is Some Guy on Reddit, so right off the bat I think there’s about a 5/6 probability that the story is bullshit. Also, the picture shows only one question and part of the next, so we don’t get the context. It may be the case that this is one question in a series based on a set of givens we can’t see. There could have been instructions like, “For questions 5-9, assume Marty and Luis each buy an 8” personal pizza…" Who knows? It may be that the teacher wrote a stupid question and graded it poorly, or it may be that this is yet another example of some asshole trolling with a fake or misleading story about "the American educational system ". Because it’s easier to point to some dumb thing that happened (or didn’t) in some backwater school as the reason for whatever educational problems we have instead of dealing with systemic inequality and political stupidity.
Going another step or two, let’s break this down:
The problem states three facts:
- Marty ate 4/6 of his pizza.
- Luis ate 5/6 of his pizza.
- Marty ate more than Luis.
“How is that possible?” in any reasonable world is asking, “how can we resolve this seeming contradiction?”
The student comes up with the obvious way: Marty had a bigger pizza.
Another way, as some have already suggested, is that along with eating 4/6 of his own pizza, Marty had >1/6 of someone else’s pizza.
Now the teacher tosses in a new assumption: (4) the pizzas are all the same size.
But Marty still could have eaten a chunk of someone else’s pizza.
OK, let’s add: (5) Marty just eats from that one pizza.
Now we have five facts that can’t all be true.
But here’s the deal: we don’t know which ‘fact’ is false, and neither does the teacher. If we can toss out fact #3, why not fact #1 or fact #2 instead? Maybe Luis only ate half his pizza. Maybe Marty ate all of his. If the pizzas are the same size, and Marty only ate from his pizza, we *still *can’t say Marty ate less pizza than Luis.
The “I mindlessly plug numbers into word problems without thinking about them” answer, I would surmise.
Funniest thing I’ve read all year. Seriously.
I don’t want to bump an ancient thread, but that question is not unreasonable if you know that ‘round one up and one down by similar amounts’ is an estimation technique. They rounded a number up by 1/8 and the other down by 1/10. The up/down feature is an important part of it, and one that’s easy to miss.
In your post, and in lots like these, there’s a hidden but standard technique that’s not obvious unless you’re in class all week. In the OP’s case, it’s just stupid. Not only is the teacher wrong, but he’s demonstrably wrong. The student demonstrated why, so no further discussion is necessary. “It’s not possible” can be and has been disproven, so what’s left to argue about?
Huh? Not when you’re subtracting one number from another one.
There’s material for a fine off-color joke in that…
Our daughter had a science test this week. She got a 95. The question she got wrong showed a chart of a bus’s speed, with speed on the Y axis and time on the X axis. There were 5 line segments on the chart. Segment E-F went from X=10, Y=5 to X=15, Y=5 (that is, from time 10 to time 15, the bus’s speed was 5).
The question: What was the bus doing in segment E-F?
(A) The bus was accelerating
(B) The bus was stationary
© The bus was decelerating
(D) The bus was moving at a constant speed
She chose D. The teacher said the answer is B. She tried to discuss it with him but he just said “The speed didn’t change so the bus was stationary.” She believes that he thought that the Y axis was distance, not speed, since other charts on the test were configured that way. She pointed that out and he still insisted that she was wrong. She pointed out a different line segment where the speed was constant at zero for 4 units of time to show how a stationary bus would look on the chart but he still didn’t get it. So she gave up. I guess we should have posted it on Facebook.
I understood the assignment and I highly value estimation. However, I believe any problem that uses subtraction of two positive numbers and results in a greater number is fundamentally flawed and defeats the purpose of the exercise.