A dad was left scratching his head over his daughter’s second grade math homework, which focused on how best to equally divide a series of pizzas.
Homework can be a stressful experience for both children and parents alike. A survey of nearly 800 US parents with school-age children published in 2020, which was conducted by the technology company Narbis, found that 63 per cent view their children’s homework as a source of household stress and frustration.
That certainly proved to be the case for one dad from Toronto, Canada, who requested he remain anonymous. He recently took to Reddit, posting the under the handle u/veraciousQuest, to ask for help with his daughter’s homework.
“I was reviewing my daughter’s homework as we typically do after she completes it and wasn’t sure if she was doing it right,” he told Newsweek. “Upon reading the problem I actually found myself puzzled.”
The question, posted alongside the dad’s Reddit query, which gained more than 100 upvotes since being shared last month, presented two different drawings of a pizza. One was drawn into thirds while the other was drawn into quarters. “Three people want to share the pizzas,” the question on the sheet read. “What fraction of the pizza would each person get?”
Looking at the drawings and the question posed, the dad felt confused. “While the question seemed straight forward, it wasn’t clear what was expected, mainly because there were 5 pizzas to solve [in total] and technically the answer should have been the same for each, only the drawings being different,” he said. “Between having doubts and my daughter explaining her lessons I decided to get other perspectives from the Reddit community.”
It soon turned out he was right to be confused by what was asked, with fellow users flocking to offer up their own theories as to what the correct answer should be.
“This is a terribly confusing exercise,” one user wrote with another replying: “I think it’s magnificent. It helps get at a basic concept: that a whole thing is a whole thing. I dabbles in potentially complex fractional maths – but if you understand the first principle, you can entirely avoid any calculations whatsoever.”
A third interjected: “Yes but that’s assuming you can create more slices. And it didn’t say they want to share the whole pizza or that the shares have to be equal. If there were a number of slices, even of different proportions, but you could arrange them in a way to give an equal part to everyone, then I would agree with you. I don’t understand how you’re supposed to know you have to cut more slices.”
Elsewhere, another user responded: “There is absolutely no requirement to cut slices. The question says nothing about slices.” Another came back to them asking: “Exactly. So why show a pizza cut in four slices ? All I’m saying is that the instructions and the data can be confusing.”
One user, meanwhile, concluded: “Teaching kids to assess data is important. Mild confusion helps with realizing sometimes you have to think through a question. There is no computation required. Don’t be distracted by extra information (whether visual, computational, or otherwise). If a pizza is divided evenly among three people, what fraction of the pizza would each person get?”
The dad posting the problem to Reddit said he was “quite surprised” by how much debate it seemed to spark. “But it also affirmed my belief that there was indeed ambiguity around the problem and it could be interpreted many ways,” he said. “Some of the answers were definitely helpful, one actually being correct in that the focus was supposed to be on an equal division of the pizza and not on the fraction as the problem suggested.”
In the end the dad confirmed his daughter went with her original answer, as drawn on the sheet, where she divided the first pizza into thirds, and the second saw each person get a quarter of the pie plus a third of the fourth slice each.
The viral post comes hot-on-the-heels of a 5th grade math problem that had the internet baffled. In another instance, a six-year-old girl was the talk of social media after spotting a major flaw in the assignment she was given. Another 6th grade math problem had both mom and dad confused and in need of help.
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