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The problem at hand is "what are you supposed to do" vs the actual problem at hand. At first I had a difficulty seeing why 20 should be wrong, but then it dawn
by bayesianhorse 14y ago
The problem at hand is "what are you supposed to do" vs the actual problem at hand.
At first I had a difficulty seeing why 20 should be wrong, but then it dawned upon me: The teacher set out to create a word problem for a specific mathematic solution strategy. Students probably were inundated with this strategy for weeks before the test, so for them it is very clear what they were supposed to do.
- quacker 14y agoAbsolutely. The test was probably written by the person grading it to cover fraction/ratio problems. The question shown is a poor rewrite of something like, "If it takes 10 minutes to fill two buckets, how long does it take to fill three buckets?"
- gizmo686 14y agoThe format of the page looks like something out of a book, not something that the teacher made. My guess of what happened is that when the teacher went to solve the problem, she read it as the bucket problem.
- rquantz 14y agoYes, the teacher was trying to teach fractions, the student was doing discrete math.
- a-nikolaev 14y agoThanks, finally I see the reason behind the teacher's solution... I think, this is a good example why you should not divide math problems in rigid cetegories. Things become worse when badly taught high school students go to college, and fail to do simple arithmetics and algebra.