That teacher should be fired How can they be allowed to teach and fuck that up
This is one of those problems that makes more sense with context. The teacher had the students working on “reasonableness”, which is essentially “does the question I’m asking make sense?”. The students were probably instructed to ignore actually trying to solve the problem when presented with one, but instead explain why the question either does or doesn’t make sense.
In this case the student potentially misunderstood the task. The failure on the teacher’s part is wording the question in such a way that it actually has a reasonable solution, and isn’t necessarily an unreasonable question.
The feedback should look totally different if that was the case though
This isn’t testing reasonableness. This is testing to see if a student understands that to properly compare fractions the wholes have to start as equivalent.
Source: I use questions similar to this every year because if I don’t get some real funky diagrams.
I use questions similar to this
The question literally says “how is this possible”.
If the answer you’re expecting is “it’s not possible”, that’s a terrible question. You shouldn’t be using trick questions on students trying to learn a new concept.
But as established before, the teacher is an idiot and wrong. I promise you that the teacher did not create that assessment herself. Shit, the font looks like it was put out by Envision/Savvas, a huge producer of math curricula in the US. The developers of that curriculum are expecting the students to not answer “it’s not possible”. They are expecting them to answer “one of the pizzas was larger”. I promise you if you look at the provided answers that is the expected answer. It’s not a trick question, it’s a question to get the students to think critically and figure out what would make the situation possible.
How in the holy fuck is everyone still focusing on “it’s a bad question” and not “this teacher is a fucking moron who doesn’t understand the curriculum they are supposed to be teaching”? Jesus, for years I’ve been listening to people bitch about critical thinking not being taught, and then they see this and immediately complain about a critical thinking question.
“If Y is true, what must we do to X to ensure Y is true?”
But… you can totally compare fractions without the whole being equivalent. You just have to know the size of the wholes. It’s just a poorly phrased question that has more than one correct answer when only one was intended.
Edit: also, it’s totally testing reasonableness, that’s literally the title of the question. Still poorly phrased though.
90% of these are faked for Internet points. Just like 99% of text message screenshots.
No internet points here
Exactly! The answer the kid gave is the “correct” one because it shows a proper reasoning about fractions. While the teachers logic assumes that fractions are some kind of absolute value of measure???
That’s what annoys me with marking that as wrong. The kid clearly understood the problem.
Teacher doesn’t know there’s more than one size of pizza I guess.
The teacher’s from another timeline where the “pizza” made it into SI as the standard unit of food area.
Nah, the kid’s right. Suppose Marty eats 4/6 of his pizza p1, and Luis eats 5/6 of his pizza p2, it means that for 4/6 p1 > 5/6 p2, p1 > (5/6)/(4/6) p2, which equals p1 > 5/4 p2
In other words, Marty’s pizza needs to be at least 25% larger than Luis’.
is this common core?
if so its is teaching how unreasonable the world can be at least.
It’s a pretty common problem in 4th/5th grade. I wouldn’t say it’s common core. It’s just making sure students know that to properly compare fractions the wholes need to begin as the same size.
Teacher never ate pizza, apparently.
