this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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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.
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.
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.
9 and 10 year olds lack the understanding or ability adjust for differently sized wholes.
Ok, I misspoke when I said it’s not testing for reasonableness. It’s what I get for commenting right after waking up. The reasonableness it’s checking for is can the students understand what makes the situation true. That the wholes are different sized. It’s not a poorly worded problem, the teacher just doesn’t know what they are doing.
Source: again, I teach this scenario every year and the students figure it out every year.
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?”