• wjrii@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      “Reasonableness” as the heading implies that they’ve been working on whether a word problem makes any sense at all. It’s, perhaps ironically, an attempt to help them build critical thinking skills. Then, elementary school teachers are not all brilliant minds themselves, and even the ones who are incredibly gifted educators are overworked, and their schools are generally underfunded. You get a cheap resource, maybe even a free one, or one your former mentor threw together late one night three years ago, and you can end up with a sloppy question. If you yourself are having a bad moment, or are not particularly talented, or the kid is a known shitass, then yeah, you could overreact and respond like this.

      Having just sat with my kid through a year of 5th grade math homework, it is completely plausible that this is a real quiz and a real response. Some of the question writing even in the professionally made materials is just not good, partly because it presumes a laser focus on a single “instructional variable,” despite mandates to teach holistically.

      • tomi000@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        The title being “Reasonableness” makes it pretty obvious that the kids answer is the correct one thats being asked for. Could be that the teacher just found the question somewhere without the answer but it seems more plausible to me that its a joke.