It may have been years—or even decades—since some of us were in school, but internet users still find themselves regularly flummoxed by homework assignments.
Over the years, there have been more than a few posts from baffled parents asking for help with their elementary school-aged child’s homework.
And while there’s sometimes a simple solution, more often than not the most popular posts are either exceedingly difficult, or don’t have an answer at all.
From vocabulary to math, here are some of the biggest headscratchers school kids have come home with.
First-grade English homework
In 2024, Gary, the father of a first grader was forced to ask Reddit for help with his son’s homework, which asked students to fill in the missing word in a sentence.
The words in question were fist, fast, puff, pass, hiss, mess, less, gas, mass, and class. And it started off simple, such as “The snake will [hiss] at you,” and “Let’s clean up this [mess].”
But things went awry with three questions: “What’s the [blank] of this pen?” and “Our [blank] has white stars.”
At the time, the father, who posts to Reddit under the username u/Thin_Butterscotch827, told Newsweek he asked the internet for help because he “didn’t want to be ‘that parent’ that tries to know more than the teacher but is actually wrong.”
Unfortunately, the internet was just as stumped. It was generally agreed that the answer for one would be “What’s the [mass] of this pen?” but as one commenter summed it up, they were “not sure how a first grader is going to know that.”
Others guessed that “Our [blank] has white stars” was supposed to be “flag,” representing the stars and stripes of the United States–but there was no “flag” in the answer.
Gary told Newsweek: “Those that offered their thoughts came to the same conclusion as we did, that there was an error with the worksheet.
“It was a relief to know I wasn’t just dumb. There being no obvious answer except that it was an error.”
“Bonkers” fifth-grade maths
One Reddit post shared by user u/SoverignOne even had a leading maths expert scratching her head as she described the assignment as “bonkers.”
The question, given to a 10-year-old as homework, asked: “Marvin uses 0.34 gallons of paint on each wall of his house. About [how] many gallons of paint does Marvin need to paint 37 walls in his house?”
Instructions asked students to “round each decimal to the nearest whole number” and the 10-year-old wanted to put the answer as 0, as it is the closest whole number to 0.34.
Incredibly, the parent said they asked the math teacher for the answer, and she confirmed the answer was indeed 0, which left Redditors outraged as one commenter wrote: “This is why math is difficult for so many people, we try to make it relatable but just make nonsense questions as a result.”
At the time, Julia Smith, a UK-based maths specialist who has authored math study guides and is an expert panel member for one of the country’s leading examination boards, told Newsweek it was a “bonkers question.”
That said, she suggested that the instructions for the problem were wrong. “Convention dictates that rounding occurs at the end of a calculation,” Smith told Newsweek. “So you would do the calculation 37 x 0.34 which gives 12.58.”
“I’d suggest, as you can buy paint in 1 gallon tins or combinations to make 13 gallons, that you’d need 13 gallons.”
First grade “higher order thinking”
In April, the dad of a first grader shared his child’s math problem to Reddit via his account u/beachITguy, which racked up 11,000 upvotes as adults on the internet struggled to solve it.
It asked a relatively simple question, but with instructions that left everyone baffled: “Can you prove that 4 + 2 = 5 + 1 is true without solving both sides of the equation?”
The father told Newsweek at the time: “I was having a hard time getting my brain to think like a child just learning addition and subtraction, how would they describe a problem without solving it.”
And Redditors agreed, one calling the problem “nutty” as “you’re asking for a higher level math or cognitive thought than a first grader should be expected of. At that level, understanding how and why they’re the same is solid.”
However, one commenter who identified themselves as a first-grade teacher defended the problem as “trying to get the kids to think beyond the simple memorization or even algorithm,” and said it “should be the focus of math at that age.”
They told fellow Redditors that the following is the correct answer:
4+2=5+1
4+1+1=5+1
(4+1)+1=5+1
5+1=5+1
The “impossible” children
A math question set for an 11-year-old in the UK caused some grizzly imagery as it asked what percentage of children chose a particular answer.
The question showed a pie chart along with the words: “20 children were asked where they would like to go on a trip.”
It revealed that 65% of the children chose the theme park, while an equal amount of the remaining kids chose between the zoo and the theater.
The question asked what percentage of children chose the zoo, and what percentage chose the theater. And while the obvious answer is 17.5 percent, the parent, u/NicePersonOnReddit, told Newsweek that he and his child “spent 10 minutes or more discussing the inevitable poor half children.”
It was viewed a whopping 7 million times on Reddit, with commenters joking at the idea that there could be two ‘half’ children in the class in order for the answer to be correct.
“The 0.5 children shall merge together to be a new child,” one joked.
M is for…
In September of this year, impossible homework posts began making the rounds again as children returned to school.
And it didn’t take long before Threads user @rogeradobson1 took to the internet to ask for help with their child’s worksheet, which was helping kids learn their letters.
It started easily enough, showing an L with a picture of a leaf beside it, but things went awry when it came to the letter M, which had what appeared to be four identical boxes with a dot in the middle.
Following the M, things went back to normal, with N for “Net”, and O for “Ox.”
The user asked: “Help me out here. I understand that L is for leaf, N is for net, O is for Ox … What is M?”
More than 5,000 people replied to the post, some making jokes while others went for genuine options, one user suggested the boxes looked like Mahjong, a Chinese tile-based game.
Another jokingly suggested the boxes looked like snack food Cheez-its, writing: “All I could think og was ‘Mmcheez-its.”
Eventually, one user who identified themselves as a language teacher explained the answer is “‘many’ or ‘multiple.'” However, others were unimpressed by this, as one commenter hit back: “If that’s the case, M is clearly for ‘mind games,’ because I’m not buying it.”
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