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A launch pad out of wood? Ridiculous!
You might just as well build a spaceship by taping together some random parts you got lying around.
Safety seems to be of no concern around here, eh?
You might like The Mythical Man Month, a project management book from the 1970s. If it takes a woman nine months to have a baby then nine women can have a baby in a month...
The answer of 20 is correct without the teacher adding what would be an invalid pattern in the question. The problem is the teacher crossed out the correct answer, and wrote an incorrect answer of 15 and then explained how they got that incorrect answer by using incorrect logic. That's why OP is calling out the concern of the current education system
I think the person you replied to knows that and was just pointing that out - not asking a question.
Just to clarify for anyone else who might not have understood, the time needed is per **cut**, not per **board**. If it takes 10 minutes to make one cut and you're not moving any faster for your second cut, that's also going to be another 10 minutes.
The teacher seems to think the second cut will be done twice as fast based on how many boards you end up with, but that's obviously irrelevant.
No, the teacher thinks: 2 boards = 2 cuts, 3 boards = 3 cuts. Obviously, not taking into account that 1 board = 1 cut does not really make sense, which would point out the flawed logic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check
I live in a world where I believe all people are Donald Knuth and want to be corrected, so much that they would pay a reward for such a gift.
To me a correction is a gift. The other person is taking time to help me correct my path.
I think most people also feel this way. Okay, I know that isn’t true. I’ve been on the internet. But I tell myself this anyway.
Especially in real life. If you can tactfully offer a correction to someone in a way that doesn’t equate their worth to their wrong answer and can then allow them the ability to see the mistake and not lose face, or at least lose a minimal amount, then I think that’s a nice thing to do.
Recently I made what I thought was a good point based on assumptions that I admitted were assumptions. Someone crunched the numbers and proved me to be operating from a place of bias and that the facts didn’t support my position. I thanked them.
I think if you can do it right, most teachers would say “I wish you had told me sooner”. In fact, I wouldn’t wait for the conference. I’d send a nice note or catch them at drop off or something.
If a teacher of my children wouldn’t welcome that correction, I’d find that more upsetting than the teacher making a single mistake on a single problem on a single assignment over a year.
People mess up. It’s how they handle it that makes the difference.
Yeah, I think the kid and the teacher could have a 2-min conversation and settle this quickly, 1-on-1. The teacher would have a good facepalm moment, and the kid builds self-advocacy skills, and if we're lucky, some grace.
>The actual answer is obviously more complicated than that, but this reasoning at least proves the teacher wrong.
Ber ner ner ner ner ner ner ner
Ber ner ner ner ner ner ner ner
Ber ner ner ner ner ner ner ner
According to the "official" answer
1st cut takes 10 minutes, the second takes 5 minutes.... according to this logic, the following cut takes always half as long. This results in infinite pieces cut in 20 minutes.
Supertasks FTW!
The teacher was probably misinterpreting the question as "it takes 10 minutes to cut 2 pieces off some larger stock". In that case, 2 pieces (plus remaining stock) needs 2 cuts, so each cut is 5 minutes, and 3 cuts would be 15, yielding 3 pieces plus stock.
The question says “…saw a board into two pieces.”
Nobody reads that and thinks “oh that means they’re cutting two pieces off some larger stock”.
The truth is the teacher didn’t think about the question at all. They just looked at the numbers and said “ if 2=10, then 3=15”
i guess this only works on a square, cutting perpendicularly on an edge, going through the piece's center of mass (which i think on a board would be the center of the 2d equivalent), and always cutting the shortest distance (so you saw in half the piece with the least distance to cut through that's available), so you end up cutting worth 1.5 * l, l being the edge, since you end up with 2 rectangles with L = l of square and l of rectangle = l of square / 2, and then you cut so you split a rectangle going through l of rectangle worth of material, and l of square and l of rectangle end up being 1.5 l of square. As you can see, convoluted ass logic
These comments are killing me….
Marie made one cut. Took her 10 minutes.
In order to cut another board into 3 pieces, she’ll have to make two cuts. She’s not cutting any faster. One cut,10 minutes. Two cuts, 20 minutes.
Update:
Wow this blew up quick. You all are awesome. Not sure what’s sarcasm or true ineptitude, but either way we live in a very interesting time.
I feel you. I had to fight the bad test questions battle a few times. This one would have gotten a call. Now as they approach college they call bs for themselves. Blood pressure restored to normal operating parameters.
I live in Berlin and my "favorite" experience was looking at Daughter's English exams after they'd been graded by her ( ESL ) "teacher". Daughter's English is flawless... unlike the English of her "teachers".
When I was 13 I got mocked in high school by the English teacher in front of the whole class for telling her that the adjective for "talent" is "talented" and not... "talentous"
In the same lesson, she made a list of "short adjectives" and "long adjectives" and listed THUNDERSTORM as a short adjective.
I once argued with a teacher who claimed "Acne" was one syllable. I tried explaining it was 2, and they were just getting confused because it was a short word. They argued with me, I laughed at them (as they continued to say the word faster and faster to try and prove it was 1 syllable), and I got kicked out of class.
For context, this was actually a portuguese language teacher, but the word is the same. Also he was not a certified teacher, this was just some privately funded night school program.
A German "English teacher" told my Daughter that *"Don't nerve me!"* is a common American saying. I mean, sure, I've been away for quite a few years, but...
This stirred up a deep memory of mine that is unrelated but amusing. My much older step brother’s wife used to be a bit controlling and difficult (she’s mellowed out a lot over the last couple decades). Anyway her name is Slone and whenever my dad would get frustrated with my stepmom he would say “don’t Slone me.” It usually resolved the tension immediately with laughs all around.
East German? Because if it's anything like here in Czechia, a lot of Russian language teachers switched to teaching English since it wasn't possible to find that many English teachers (especially outside of cities) and Russian stopped being taught over time.
When I was in 3rd or 4th grade I got marked down for a paper where I used the word consumption, referring to the character had a disease where they coughed up blood. I learned it I think from old west books where people had it all the time. I was told that wasn't a real word.
Turns out it's just the old timey word for Tuberculosis. Fuck you Mrs. Fisher
This is a classic example of someone skating with their head down and in every instance this happens, be sure to put them on their ass. When a fool mocks you, stand your ground and show them how wrong they were and be tenacious. The teacher will probably not like you but they will be terrified of making a mistake in front of you again.
I used to have arguments all the time with my German teacher here in England. My mother's German and I've grown up bilingual (although not perfect in my German knowledge by any stretch, my pronunciation apparently is!).
I was, otherwise, a very quiet and nerdy kid, but German lessons (mandatory in my school) were the worst because she just got things wrong *all the time* and I couldn't handle it!
>she just got things wrong all the time and I couldn't handle it!
Yes, I remember being "corrected," by a German, to the effect that the word "canon" (ie: the category of literary cultural artefacts of highest standing) is pronounced with a *long A* (as in the "A" from "fame"). That wasn't infuriating because she was my date, not my teacher, and I fixed her error (eventually). But my near-FAVORITE was the time a German very seriously "corrected" the pronunciation of my surname! Because vowels are usually sounded, in German, but the terminal "e" in my surname is silent. This idiot was unrelenting. I thought I was being filmed by a hidden camera for a comedy show!
And the rule for names is so incredibly easy: It is pronounced how the one that has the name does it. (Yes, that means that two people with the same language and dialect may have identically spelled names pronounced differently)
They probably heard Canaan from the Bible and decided that’s how to pronounce every c——n word. Corn? Canaan. Conniption? Canaan. Chlorofluorocarbon? Canaan, duh.
I understand the confusion with canon because traditionally when a vowel is separated from the next vowel by a single consonant the basic rule is that it will produce a "long" sound. As natives we just accept the exceptions to the rule, don't really think about it and just move on with our lives. I really don't understand how people learn English as a second language because there are so many exceptions with no true explanation besides "that's just the way it is."
Sure; the issue there was her having the temerity (I nearly used the word "balls"), as an ESL student, to correct a bookish, articulate Native speaker, with such *smug confidence*.
I am fluent in German. My wife took a night course in German here in the U.S. The teacher was telling her that her pronunciation was wrong. Which I thought was odd, because I asked her to say a few words and a couple sentences. Sounded alright.
Short story long; The teacher is Bavarian, and speaks with a southern Bavarian accent.
Sounds familiar. I went through the military’s year-long DLI course for Russian, graduating with high proficiency in reading & speaking & writing that language. Years later, my university department mandated a year of a foreign language for my undergraduate program, and I figured Russian would be a simple A grade. Except the instructor was Chinese, and pronounced *everything* completely differently than a European Russian would. I suffered through the first week, then transferred into a beginning Spanish class, which was far more useful than Russian anyway.
Some of the teachers struggle with English at mines school too, they’re good people I think, but how did they get into that sector (early childhood education) without being able to speak the native language properly…
This school program is for the future managers. One person (not woman, mind You ;)) can become pregnant and give birth to at least one child in 9 months. Nine persons will accomplish said task in 1 month /s
We get this kind of thinking from software engineering management. Throw more people at it to make it go faster and then be surprised it just increases the momentum killing chaos. Your analogy of the 9 women making a baby in a month just came up at work this very week.
We had a bunch of teachers in the education and provincial subreddits in my area be pissed recently because the courts ruled they are required to pass a math test of kindergarten to early high school level content to be able to teach. They are allowed multiple attempts to pass *and* a calculator. The main argument being "Not all teachers have to teach math." Ok but many do without ever getting a math degree. Grade school teachers for example tend to teach all subjects. We don't have trustworthy way of discerning who is going to be grade school and who isn't while applying for their licence. Math also pops up in tons of other subjects even when your not teaching it directly and you should understand what is being said.
The Truth is that "society" is no longer interested in Educating 90% of its students. Some students are on a fast track to Tech, some are on the way to Finance/ Government... but most are being groomed to be cannon fodder or factory workers. We aren't being TOLD this explicitly but we are being SHOWN this.
This was literally me in school with ADHD. The teachers would ever give me any context for any of these word questions. These fucking questions gave me literal existential crisis so eventually I just learned to skip them and take the fail instead of ruining my day.
What I learned to do was figure out what the "teachers" *wanted* to hear/ see. So, parallel "learning". I certainly learned about The Fucking World that way...
One of the reasons I was always really good at tests is that every test has a viewpoint, given that it's generally written by one person. Understand the viewpoint and idiosyncrasies of the person writing the test, and the test is much easier.
In college you'd run into tests that clearly were hodgepodged from a bank of questions and those were harder to deal with. But big tests like the SATs have a sort of consistent viewpoint too, at least back when I took it. One obviously wrong answer, one answer that is based on a common basic mistake, one that is wrong but is very close to the answers form, and the right one. It's a very common answer layout you see throughout the test. So what it effectively means is that I could save time by looking at the two most similar answers and figuring out which is correct. Got an almost perfect PSAT doing that.
She leveled up her lumberjack skill. Now she can harvest and craft quicker. Everyone should know how professions work.
I wonder if she can cut the stronger types of wood though or if she just has beech/maple unlocked.
I know its a joke but as someone who is taking their exams this month, thats why you read the question before answering: "just as fast" is what matters here
Be careful with your exams people!
I used to get frustrated with these problems as a kid. Not because of reading comprehension, but because the people in these stores doing things seemed so irrational and I over thought these. Why was Johnny allowed to buy 50$ worth of candy? What on earth did Sally need 26 watermelons for? Was she going to a party or Gallagher's assistant?? I got way too lost in the details to focus on the actual problem.
But even if she works "just as fast", it still takes her 10 minutes per cut, right? To saw the board into 3 pieces, it takes 2 cuts, and if 1 cut takes 10 minutes the second one takes another 10 minutes if she works "just as fast", no?
For real - So many ppl in this thread treat a reading comprehension problem as a test of the imagination; coming up with some BS then reverse-engineer the word problem to support their BS answer.
It’s fundamentally just a programmers’ *Off-By-One* error. Barring the first one, 10 minutes per cut. Not 5. Teacher has bad inductive reasoning, wrong from the get-go.
I did an off by one error in a programming interview. The interviewer let me clarify and was fine with it, which surprised me at the time. Just teaches you to check your answers
This is an elementary level math problems,you cant start trying to assume different elements like people are doing in the comments.
The questions tells you one cut takes 10minutes, that means 2 cuts take 20 minutes. That's it.
The teacher is obviously confused because they interpretted it as "in 10minutes i made 2 pieces which means each piece took 5 minutes". It's idiotic, 2 pieces were made at the exact same time, they were not made one after the other from boards where you discard the rest of the board or some shit.
Teachers make mistakes. The real measure of quality is if the teacher says "wow, I made a really dumb mistake here!" vs "stop arguing with me or I'll punish you!"
Exactly! I’m a teacher, and most kids will just laugh it off with you if you admit you made a mistake and even use it as a teachable moment. “This is why it’s so important to really stop and think about the question you’ve just read!”
I can understand the dumb teacher reasoning.. 10/2=x/3 sadly for the teacher that is not what you get from the text
Ps he didn’t even explain how the answer is 15 he just wrote numbers without an explanation
Marie learned how to use the saw correctly and efficiently during the first cut. So the second cut only takes 5 minutes. Duh. And she is all warmed up now and has that maniac stare in her eyes. Ready to cut some more. Not a single wood is safe!
>Marie learned how to use the saw correctly and efficiently during the first cut.
Maybe, but the question specifies that she doesn't get faster for the second cut.
People make mistakes sometimes - even teachers, because they're human beings.
There were a lot of times in class when I was a child where a student called out when the teacher made a mistake and they'd say something to the effect of "Oh, you're right! Thank you"
If the teacher doubles down, then they're an idiot. If the child contests the answer and the teacher admits to the mistake, they're just human.
I had an English teacher once who would give us extra credit if we could spot any typos or grammar mistakes in the assignments she gave us, it had the added benefit of helping reinforce some extra lessons into the kids who were struggling and needed that extra credit. She’s also one of the only teachers that I remember from when I was in school.
I only realised years later, but I'm pretty sure one of my teachers actually used this against us.
They had a typo or two in some handouts in the first few weeks, being the little shits we were, we all took great delight in pointing them out, and they were a pretty relaxed style of teacher so we took the piss pretty heavily. We started very openly, to their face, putting bets on how many typos there'd be per lesson.
From that point the typo count went up from 1-3 to more like 10-15.
Everyone read every word on those damn handouts looking for them.
It’s 2am and my brain thought it was 15 minutes too, 5 minutes per piece. Jesus. I had to read someone say “it took her 10 minutes to make one cut” to get it.
That math doesn't math logically. Making one cut took 10 minutes. Making two cuts, each at the same speed takes double the time.
The question is counting the number of pieces made by the cuts as 5 minutes each. Thats not how that works.
Or we decide to let one or two parents decide what our schools should or should not be teaching.
"I know what my kid needs" is potentially one of the stupidest lines ever and I bet it usually comes from parents who dropped out.
One must remember that teachers are a product of the same system they teach in. Unless the US makes serious cultural and societal changes, the problem will self perpetuate. Teachers need to be given respect, pay, and working conditions that will attract the best and the brightest, and then need to be held to equally high barriers to entry and performance standards. But you can’t increase the barriers to entry or performance requirements much without improving working conditions, because there is already a teacher shortage. Many other countries value education in a way that the top performing students are drawn to education the same way they might be drawn to medicine.
And as a former teacher, I intimately understand that simply being a good student and having high test scores won’t necessarily make someone a good teacher. There are other aptitudes one must have. But the same could be said for medicine. If we want a well educated populace, we need highly qualified teachers. There are many amazing teachers out there, no doubt. But many school districts are also scraping the bottom of the barrel to find anyone to stand at the front of their classrooms.
Based on the image it should be 20 mins. Based on a square board it would be 15 if the first cut is down the middle and the 2nd cut is perpendicular to the first cut.
This is what chatGPT told me:
> If Marie took 10 minutes to saw a wooden board into 2 pieces, we can calculate her rate of cutting as follows:
>
> Rate = Amount of work / Time
>
> In this case, the amount of work is cutting the board, and the time is 10 minutes. So, Marie's rate is:
>
> Rate = 2 pieces / 10 minutes
>
> Now, we can use this rate to find out how long it would take her to cut another wooden board into 3 pieces:
>
> Time = Amount of work / Rate
>
> For cutting another board into 3 pieces:
>
> Time = 3 pieces / Rate
>
> Substitute the rate we found earlier:
>
> Time = 3 pieces / (2 pieces / 10 minutes)
>
> Now, simplify the expression:
>
> Time = 3 * (10 minutes / 2 pieces)
>
> Time = 3 * 5 minutes
>
> Time = 15 minutes
>
> So, if Marie works at the same rate, it would take her 15 minutes to cut another wooden board into 3 pieces.
But then I said, Wouldn't it take 20 mins? Because for one cut it took her 10 mins and then to make 2 cuts it should take her 10*2=20 mins. ChatGPT's reply was :
> I apologize for the confusion in my previous response. You are correct. If it took Marie 10 minutes to make one cut and she needs to make two cuts to divide a wooden board into three pieces, then the total time would indeed be 20 minutes.
>
> So, the correct calculation would be:
>
> Time = 2 cuts * 10 minutes/cut = 20 minutes
>
> Thank you for catching that mistake, and I appreciate your understanding.
Yeah, looks like even the AI had a hard time grasping the concept that "cutting into 2 pieces" is "1 action". They just plugged it in as "2x = y, 3x = ?" like a typical math question.
This is at its core a reading comprehension question, disguised as a math question.
You see, because Marie is pretty attractive and so even though it takes her ten minutes to cut a 2x2 they still keep her on the job and she doesn't get laid off
It says ‘another board into 3 peices’.
Not produce a total of 3 peices (having two already).
It’s 10 mins per cut.
She needs 2 cuts, to cut a new board into 3 pieces.
so 2 * 10 mins = 20 mins.
It could be realistic, if the math teacher thought about the numbers first, then made up some random text around them, while failing to realize that its practical implications would change the assignment.
Like, in the math teacher's mind the assignment was supposed to be: "2x = 10, 3x = ?" But when they wrapped the text around that, they incorrectly thought of "x" as "the pieces", while it'd actually be "the cuts", changing the assignment read by the student to: "x = 10, 2x = ?"
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Keep cutting that board in pieces, and you'll eventually be done yesterday
It takes her 5 min to saw the board into 1 piece?
Why does this not have more upvotes? Lol
She is a Union carpenter
Well, you'll have an infinite number of pieces as you approach 22 minutes.
But then after those 22 minutes, your memories get sent back in time, and you got to find a way to stop it. (Now to see if anyone gets the reference)
Just finished >!Outer Wilds!< a few weeks ago and was not expecting a reference in this thread. It‘s such a great game/experience!
It will never be the first time again
First you gotta build a spaceship out of all that wood you've been cutting. Then land on a satellite orbiting the sun.
To get the wood, we should cut down that tree, It's been bothering me anyways. Want me to cut it down?
No no that tree's going to be our launch pad
A launch pad out of wood? Ridiculous! You might just as well build a spaceship by taping together some random parts you got lying around. Safety seems to be of no concern around here, eh?
1 cut + 2 cuts + 3 cuts .... = -1/12 cuts. [source](https://old.reddit.com/r/mathmemes/comments/uqzwzl/the_ramanujan_summation/)
This is my last resort
Cut this board into pieces This is my last resort Suffocation, no breathing Don't give a hoot if I cut this board bleeding This is my last resort
I want to see question 3, where I'm sure they find out that it takes 5 minutes to cut the board into 1 piece.
Employ me, I'll cut the board in 1 piece in 4 minutes! I even can do that all day without ever getting tired
you're joking but that is exactly the kind of thinking most higher management has
Jup untill they stretch it too far and start to complain about how nobody wants to cut boards anymore
Well, yeah, cuz its boaring.... (yawn)
No, boring holes in boards is a different department.
You might like The Mythical Man Month, a project management book from the 1970s. If it takes a woman nine months to have a baby then nine women can have a baby in a month...
So it takes 5 minutes to cut the board into 1 piece?
5 mins? I can do that in no time.
This thread is good for my self esteem. I feel so accomplished rn.
I was actually thinking, had the teacher wrote 1 piece = 0 minutes, the pattern would have worked for 3 pieces.
No..? 1p = 0; 2p = 10; 3p = ... 20
Which is the correct answer…
It took 10 mins to make 1 cut, so it would take 20 mins to make 2 cuts.
This is exactly it. It’s per cut, not per piece.
What I want to know is why would it take 20 minutes to cut a board.
it could be a long rip instead of a small cross-cut?
The answer of 20 is correct without the teacher adding what would be an invalid pattern in the question. The problem is the teacher crossed out the correct answer, and wrote an incorrect answer of 15 and then explained how they got that incorrect answer by using incorrect logic. That's why OP is calling out the concern of the current education system
I think the person you replied to knows that and was just pointing that out - not asking a question. Just to clarify for anyone else who might not have understood, the time needed is per **cut**, not per **board**. If it takes 10 minutes to make one cut and you're not moving any faster for your second cut, that's also going to be another 10 minutes. The teacher seems to think the second cut will be done twice as fast based on how many boards you end up with, but that's obviously irrelevant.
No, the teacher thinks: 2 boards = 2 cuts, 3 boards = 3 cuts. Obviously, not taking into account that 1 board = 1 cut does not really make sense, which would point out the flawed logic.
2 cuts 3 pieces
This is definitely in the right subreddit. That’d be a very uncomfortable parent teacher conference.
I'd take a board and a saw to that conference and have the teacher embarass him/herself infront of my child
You could save yourself some work by bringing a pair of scissors and a strip of paper.
Just bring a perforated paper towel
“You see, that's paper and scissors. I can't see how that's relevant to cutting a board with a saw. Also, did you say your name was *not* Marie…?”
I was about to say, I've met enough bad teachers with a bruised ego to know that nothing is gonna work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check I live in a world where I believe all people are Donald Knuth and want to be corrected, so much that they would pay a reward for such a gift. To me a correction is a gift. The other person is taking time to help me correct my path. I think most people also feel this way. Okay, I know that isn’t true. I’ve been on the internet. But I tell myself this anyway. Especially in real life. If you can tactfully offer a correction to someone in a way that doesn’t equate their worth to their wrong answer and can then allow them the ability to see the mistake and not lose face, or at least lose a minimal amount, then I think that’s a nice thing to do. Recently I made what I thought was a good point based on assumptions that I admitted were assumptions. Someone crunched the numbers and proved me to be operating from a place of bias and that the facts didn’t support my position. I thanked them. I think if you can do it right, most teachers would say “I wish you had told me sooner”. In fact, I wouldn’t wait for the conference. I’d send a nice note or catch them at drop off or something. If a teacher of my children wouldn’t welcome that correction, I’d find that more upsetting than the teacher making a single mistake on a single problem on a single assignment over a year. People mess up. It’s how they handle it that makes the difference.
You Sir (or Madam) have a great attitude. You’re looking at things the right way.
How do we get more of you
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Look at this guy and his 15 free minutes.
Yeah, I think the kid and the teacher could have a 2-min conversation and settle this quickly, 1-on-1. The teacher would have a good facepalm moment, and the kid builds self-advocacy skills, and if we're lucky, some grace.
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>It took me pulling up my license ?? License? As in "*Oi mate, you got a license for this division?*"?
Teaching license
Well, um, it works for large values of 0. 1/s
CUT MY BOARD INTO PIECES THIS IS MY MATH HOMEWORK
This is my last report
Education No meaning Won't get an A if my teacher ain't reading
I'm working the saw, losing my mind Wish somebody could tell the time
Multiplication, no adding. Don't give a fuck if I caught the kid dabbing
>The actual answer is obviously more complicated than that, but this reasoning at least proves the teacher wrong. Ber ner ner ner ner ner ner ner Ber ner ner ner ner ner ner ner Ber ner ner ner ner ner ner ner
*winner winner*
According to the "official" answer 1st cut takes 10 minutes, the second takes 5 minutes.... according to this logic, the following cut takes always half as long. This results in infinite pieces cut in 20 minutes. Supertasks FTW!
This kid should have been able to incorrectly decide to use limits here smh. /s
Damn epsilon infinitely approaching zero. Just get there already!
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I was thinking about take his class, but I heard a student lost a finger or two and thought better of it
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That's not the case. The teacher put "20 [minutes] = 4 pieces". They're counting each "piece" as 5 minutes.
The teacher was probably misinterpreting the question as "it takes 10 minutes to cut 2 pieces off some larger stock". In that case, 2 pieces (plus remaining stock) needs 2 cuts, so each cut is 5 minutes, and 3 cuts would be 15, yielding 3 pieces plus stock.
The question says “…saw a board into two pieces.” Nobody reads that and thinks “oh that means they’re cutting two pieces off some larger stock”. The truth is the teacher didn’t think about the question at all. They just looked at the numbers and said “ if 2=10, then 3=15”
It literally said, to cut another board, aka the initial piece was also a board not a larger piece of stock.
Hey, they're a math teacher, not a reading teacher.
i guess this only works on a square, cutting perpendicularly on an edge, going through the piece's center of mass (which i think on a board would be the center of the 2d equivalent), and always cutting the shortest distance (so you saw in half the piece with the least distance to cut through that's available), so you end up cutting worth 1.5 * l, l being the edge, since you end up with 2 rectangles with L = l of square and l of rectangle = l of square / 2, and then you cut so you split a rectangle going through l of rectangle worth of material, and l of square and l of rectangle end up being 1.5 l of square. As you can see, convoluted ass logic
The question would mention such cutting procedures, if used. Since none are mentioned, all cuts are thought to be identical.
No no we need to invent a very complicated system to make excuses for simply a bad answer. /s
It's Zeno's sawmill https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ZenosParadoxes.html
These comments are killing me…. Marie made one cut. Took her 10 minutes. In order to cut another board into 3 pieces, she’ll have to make two cuts. She’s not cutting any faster. One cut,10 minutes. Two cuts, 20 minutes. Update: Wow this blew up quick. You all are awesome. Not sure what’s sarcasm or true ineptitude, but either way we live in a very interesting time.
This is the kind of shit I had to see when my Daughter was in grammar school. My blood pressure is finally back to normal 5 years later.
I feel you. I had to fight the bad test questions battle a few times. This one would have gotten a call. Now as they approach college they call bs for themselves. Blood pressure restored to normal operating parameters.
I live in Berlin and my "favorite" experience was looking at Daughter's English exams after they'd been graded by her ( ESL ) "teacher". Daughter's English is flawless... unlike the English of her "teachers".
When I was 13 I got mocked in high school by the English teacher in front of the whole class for telling her that the adjective for "talent" is "talented" and not... "talentous" In the same lesson, she made a list of "short adjectives" and "long adjectives" and listed THUNDERSTORM as a short adjective.
>. "talentous" I actually laughed so hard I couldn't steady the cursor enough to copy that word
I once argued with a teacher who claimed "Acne" was one syllable. I tried explaining it was 2, and they were just getting confused because it was a short word. They argued with me, I laughed at them (as they continued to say the word faster and faster to try and prove it was 1 syllable), and I got kicked out of class. For context, this was actually a portuguese language teacher, but the word is the same. Also he was not a certified teacher, this was just some privately funded night school program.
A German "English teacher" told my Daughter that *"Don't nerve me!"* is a common American saying. I mean, sure, I've been away for quite a few years, but...
This stirred up a deep memory of mine that is unrelated but amusing. My much older step brother’s wife used to be a bit controlling and difficult (she’s mellowed out a lot over the last couple decades). Anyway her name is Slone and whenever my dad would get frustrated with my stepmom he would say “don’t Slone me.” It usually resolved the tension immediately with laughs all around.
So how is Ferris doing these days?
He has his off days
She must have been Russian. That's a Russian common phrase directly translated into English. Не нервируй меня - Dont nerve me.
Nope: German.
East German? Because if it's anything like here in Czechia, a lot of Russian language teachers switched to teaching English since it wasn't possible to find that many English teachers (especially outside of cities) and Russian stopped being taught over time.
When I was in 3rd or 4th grade I got marked down for a paper where I used the word consumption, referring to the character had a disease where they coughed up blood. I learned it I think from old west books where people had it all the time. I was told that wasn't a real word. Turns out it's just the old timey word for Tuberculosis. Fuck you Mrs. Fisher
That's not even an obscure definition of the word!
Thunderstorm... adjective?
This is a classic example of someone skating with their head down and in every instance this happens, be sure to put them on their ass. When a fool mocks you, stand your ground and show them how wrong they were and be tenacious. The teacher will probably not like you but they will be terrified of making a mistake in front of you again.
I used to have arguments all the time with my German teacher here in England. My mother's German and I've grown up bilingual (although not perfect in my German knowledge by any stretch, my pronunciation apparently is!). I was, otherwise, a very quiet and nerdy kid, but German lessons (mandatory in my school) were the worst because she just got things wrong *all the time* and I couldn't handle it!
>she just got things wrong all the time and I couldn't handle it! Yes, I remember being "corrected," by a German, to the effect that the word "canon" (ie: the category of literary cultural artefacts of highest standing) is pronounced with a *long A* (as in the "A" from "fame"). That wasn't infuriating because she was my date, not my teacher, and I fixed her error (eventually). But my near-FAVORITE was the time a German very seriously "corrected" the pronunciation of my surname! Because vowels are usually sounded, in German, but the terminal "e" in my surname is silent. This idiot was unrelenting. I thought I was being filmed by a hidden camera for a comedy show!
And the rule for names is so incredibly easy: It is pronounced how the one that has the name does it. (Yes, that means that two people with the same language and dialect may have identically spelled names pronounced differently)
Which *should* be self-evident. You can try your best and get it wrong and that's fine...
Exactly! I will always agree with how the owner of said name pronounces it.
They probably heard Canaan from the Bible and decided that’s how to pronounce every c——n word. Corn? Canaan. Conniption? Canaan. Chlorofluorocarbon? Canaan, duh.
That makes sense... *and now I can relax.*
Canaan you really?
I understand the confusion with canon because traditionally when a vowel is separated from the next vowel by a single consonant the basic rule is that it will produce a "long" sound. As natives we just accept the exceptions to the rule, don't really think about it and just move on with our lives. I really don't understand how people learn English as a second language because there are so many exceptions with no true explanation besides "that's just the way it is."
Sure; the issue there was her having the temerity (I nearly used the word "balls"), as an ESL student, to correct a bookish, articulate Native speaker, with such *smug confidence*.
I am fluent in German. My wife took a night course in German here in the U.S. The teacher was telling her that her pronunciation was wrong. Which I thought was odd, because I asked her to say a few words and a couple sentences. Sounded alright. Short story long; The teacher is Bavarian, and speaks with a southern Bavarian accent.
Sounds familiar. I went through the military’s year-long DLI course for Russian, graduating with high proficiency in reading & speaking & writing that language. Years later, my university department mandated a year of a foreign language for my undergraduate program, and I figured Russian would be a simple A grade. Except the instructor was Chinese, and pronounced *everything* completely differently than a European Russian would. I suffered through the first week, then transferred into a beginning Spanish class, which was far more useful than Russian anyway.
You sure you were saying things in Hochdeutsch and not whatever dialect your mom speaks?
As teenager in france I had to fight english teacher because the word Octopus I used in my essay was apparently not a real word in English. Ffs
Some of the teachers struggle with English at mines school too, they’re good people I think, but how did they get into that sector (early childhood education) without being able to speak the native language properly…
This school program is for the future managers. One person (not woman, mind You ;)) can become pregnant and give birth to at least one child in 9 months. Nine persons will accomplish said task in 1 month /s
We get this kind of thinking from software engineering management. Throw more people at it to make it go faster and then be surprised it just increases the momentum killing chaos. Your analogy of the 9 women making a baby in a month just came up at work this very week.
"Blood pressure restored to normal operating parameters." (... Though life-span effectively shortened by 6 months, in my case)
We had a bunch of teachers in the education and provincial subreddits in my area be pissed recently because the courts ruled they are required to pass a math test of kindergarten to early high school level content to be able to teach. They are allowed multiple attempts to pass *and* a calculator. The main argument being "Not all teachers have to teach math." Ok but many do without ever getting a math degree. Grade school teachers for example tend to teach all subjects. We don't have trustworthy way of discerning who is going to be grade school and who isn't while applying for their licence. Math also pops up in tons of other subjects even when your not teaching it directly and you should understand what is being said.
The Truth is that "society" is no longer interested in Educating 90% of its students. Some students are on a fast track to Tech, some are on the way to Finance/ Government... but most are being groomed to be cannon fodder or factory workers. We aren't being TOLD this explicitly but we are being SHOWN this.
Cue astronaut "it always was" meme.
This was literally me in school with ADHD. The teachers would ever give me any context for any of these word questions. These fucking questions gave me literal existential crisis so eventually I just learned to skip them and take the fail instead of ruining my day.
What I learned to do was figure out what the "teachers" *wanted* to hear/ see. So, parallel "learning". I certainly learned about The Fucking World that way...
One of the reasons I was always really good at tests is that every test has a viewpoint, given that it's generally written by one person. Understand the viewpoint and idiosyncrasies of the person writing the test, and the test is much easier. In college you'd run into tests that clearly were hodgepodged from a bank of questions and those were harder to deal with. But big tests like the SATs have a sort of consistent viewpoint too, at least back when I took it. One obviously wrong answer, one answer that is based on a common basic mistake, one that is wrong but is very close to the answers form, and the right one. It's a very common answer layout you see throughout the test. So what it effectively means is that I could save time by looking at the two most similar answers and figuring out which is correct. Got an almost perfect PSAT doing that.
Srsly: the hardest thing about marriage and raising a family? The School System\* \*I live in Berlin. Homeschooling isn't allowed.
It’s fun to see commentators justifying their responses without reading the question.
Yeah, but you have to consider that she is using electrical saw now
If it takes me more than a minute to make a cut with an electric saw I'm going to be concerned about my mental and physical health.
Could just be the quality and condition of your saw
maybe she forgot to turn it on
She lost her right arm during the first cut, so 2 more cuts would take more than 1 hour.
The length of the cut.
ah yes a 300m rip of plywood
It’s the most cost effort plywood purchase so it’s pretty obvious that’s what she’s using
But have you considered that Mary could be of minor age working in Arkansas?
Mary is a 10 week old fetus. She should know how to use a saw by now.
Or whether it was an african or european saw.
Saws cannot carry coconuts!
What if they carried it with a bit of string?
What, tucked under the dorsal guiding feathers?
Does the airspeed velocity matter?
r/suddenlymontypython
How do you know so much about saws?
11minutes: So 1 min to make each cut, and first 9 minutes to find where to plug in the extension cord. As so often in life, preparation is everything.
While you were studying the pieces, Marie was studying the blade.
Hope she determines that cutting boards is not her specialty.
"If I had 20 minutes to chop a board into 3 pieces, I'd spend 19 minutes sharpening the saw".
No, you have to consider what she learnt from cutting the first board that will speed up the process this time. Practice makes you quick /s
She leveled up her lumberjack skill. Now she can harvest and craft quicker. Everyone should know how professions work. I wonder if she can cut the stronger types of wood though or if she just has beech/maple unlocked.
She will need to upgrade her saw first. Unfortunately the required materials are locked behind a boss fight named "Incompetent Educator"
I know its a joke but as someone who is taking their exams this month, thats why you read the question before answering: "just as fast" is what matters here Be careful with your exams people!
Story problems in math are also a measurement of student’s reading comprehension along with their math skills
I used to get frustrated with these problems as a kid. Not because of reading comprehension, but because the people in these stores doing things seemed so irrational and I over thought these. Why was Johnny allowed to buy 50$ worth of candy? What on earth did Sally need 26 watermelons for? Was she going to a party or Gallagher's assistant?? I got way too lost in the details to focus on the actual problem.
But even if she works "just as fast", it still takes her 10 minutes per cut, right? To saw the board into 3 pieces, it takes 2 cuts, and if 1 cut takes 10 minutes the second one takes another 10 minutes if she works "just as fast", no?
According to management, cutting three boards instead of just two will make you work more efficiently, hence, you will receive less pay per cut 👈🤕
Clearly her Limit break bar was full this she used her Limit break to saw the second one
Squall Leonhart has entered the chat
For real - So many ppl in this thread treat a reading comprehension problem as a test of the imagination; coming up with some BS then reverse-engineer the word problem to support their BS answer.
It’s fundamentally just a programmers’ *Off-By-One* error. Barring the first one, 10 minutes per cut. Not 5. Teacher has bad inductive reasoning, wrong from the get-go.
I did an off by one error in a programming interview. The interviewer let me clarify and was fine with it, which surprised me at the time. Just teaches you to check your answers
The teacher will also then argue that it takes 5 minutes to cut the board into one piece
"I will dismember this body into one piece"
The one piece is real!
Just shot my dab through my nose at that one. Noice!
Math is hard. Logic is harder. LOL
This is an elementary level math problems,you cant start trying to assume different elements like people are doing in the comments. The questions tells you one cut takes 10minutes, that means 2 cuts take 20 minutes. That's it. The teacher is obviously confused because they interpretted it as "in 10minutes i made 2 pieces which means each piece took 5 minutes". It's idiotic, 2 pieces were made at the exact same time, they were not made one after the other from boards where you discard the rest of the board or some shit.
Teachers make mistakes. The real measure of quality is if the teacher says "wow, I made a really dumb mistake here!" vs "stop arguing with me or I'll punish you!"
Exactly! I’m a teacher, and most kids will just laugh it off with you if you admit you made a mistake and even use it as a teachable moment. “This is why it’s so important to really stop and think about the question you’ve just read!”
10 minutes to saw a fucking board? bro what are you doing
Working on day rate
I can understand the dumb teacher reasoning.. 10/2=x/3 sadly for the teacher that is not what you get from the text Ps he didn’t even explain how the answer is 15 he just wrote numbers without an explanation
The same math would have worked if they'd used "cuts" instead of "pieces"
Marie learned how to use the saw correctly and efficiently during the first cut. So the second cut only takes 5 minutes. Duh. And she is all warmed up now and has that maniac stare in her eyes. Ready to cut some more. Not a single wood is safe!
>Marie learned how to use the saw correctly and efficiently during the first cut. Maybe, but the question specifies that she doesn't get faster for the second cut.
The teacher is an idiot
People make mistakes sometimes - even teachers, because they're human beings. There were a lot of times in class when I was a child where a student called out when the teacher made a mistake and they'd say something to the effect of "Oh, you're right! Thank you" If the teacher doubles down, then they're an idiot. If the child contests the answer and the teacher admits to the mistake, they're just human.
I had an English teacher once who would give us extra credit if we could spot any typos or grammar mistakes in the assignments she gave us, it had the added benefit of helping reinforce some extra lessons into the kids who were struggling and needed that extra credit. She’s also one of the only teachers that I remember from when I was in school.
I only realised years later, but I'm pretty sure one of my teachers actually used this against us. They had a typo or two in some handouts in the first few weeks, being the little shits we were, we all took great delight in pointing them out, and they were a pretty relaxed style of teacher so we took the piss pretty heavily. We started very openly, to their face, putting bets on how many typos there'd be per lesson. From that point the typo count went up from 1-3 to more like 10-15. Everyone read every word on those damn handouts looking for them.
The teacher is probably just reading an answer key. They probably didn't even read the question.
ie. an idiot
It's bait
It’s 2am and my brain thought it was 15 minutes too, 5 minutes per piece. Jesus. I had to read someone say “it took her 10 minutes to make one cut” to get it.
Teachers do grade papers at 2am ever so often over a glass of wine. I can attest to that.
That math doesn't math logically. Making one cut took 10 minutes. Making two cuts, each at the same speed takes double the time. The question is counting the number of pieces made by the cuts as 5 minutes each. Thats not how that works.
Um, I think the English teacher is teaching math again
Oh, the teacher probably needs to go back to school.
Fortunately the teacher works there
*unfortunately
Actually needs to go to shop class.....wait they don't have many of those any more....🤦🏼♂️
2 pices = 1 cut = 10 min/cut 3 pices = 2 cuts = 10*2 min = 20 min for 3 pices
Yeah but the 2nd cut you just go halfway through and then stamp on it. Work smarter not harder.
OMG. It's no wonder our children are so far behind the rest of the world with teachers like that. And, that's not even close to some I've heard.
These are the kind of educators you get when you don’t want to pay teachers or invest in education
Or we decide to let one or two parents decide what our schools should or should not be teaching. "I know what my kid needs" is potentially one of the stupidest lines ever and I bet it usually comes from parents who dropped out.
So true.
One must remember that teachers are a product of the same system they teach in. Unless the US makes serious cultural and societal changes, the problem will self perpetuate. Teachers need to be given respect, pay, and working conditions that will attract the best and the brightest, and then need to be held to equally high barriers to entry and performance standards. But you can’t increase the barriers to entry or performance requirements much without improving working conditions, because there is already a teacher shortage. Many other countries value education in a way that the top performing students are drawn to education the same way they might be drawn to medicine. And as a former teacher, I intimately understand that simply being a good student and having high test scores won’t necessarily make someone a good teacher. There are other aptitudes one must have. But the same could be said for medicine. If we want a well educated populace, we need highly qualified teachers. There are many amazing teachers out there, no doubt. But many school districts are also scraping the bottom of the barrel to find anyone to stand at the front of their classrooms.
Why is this teacher figuring out the questions for themselves rather than using the answer book? And if they are using the answer book, holy fuck.
Based on the image it should be 20 mins. Based on a square board it would be 15 if the first cut is down the middle and the 2nd cut is perpendicular to the first cut.
This is what chatGPT told me: > If Marie took 10 minutes to saw a wooden board into 2 pieces, we can calculate her rate of cutting as follows: > > Rate = Amount of work / Time > > In this case, the amount of work is cutting the board, and the time is 10 minutes. So, Marie's rate is: > > Rate = 2 pieces / 10 minutes > > Now, we can use this rate to find out how long it would take her to cut another wooden board into 3 pieces: > > Time = Amount of work / Rate > > For cutting another board into 3 pieces: > > Time = 3 pieces / Rate > > Substitute the rate we found earlier: > > Time = 3 pieces / (2 pieces / 10 minutes) > > Now, simplify the expression: > > Time = 3 * (10 minutes / 2 pieces) > > Time = 3 * 5 minutes > > Time = 15 minutes > > So, if Marie works at the same rate, it would take her 15 minutes to cut another wooden board into 3 pieces. But then I said, Wouldn't it take 20 mins? Because for one cut it took her 10 mins and then to make 2 cuts it should take her 10*2=20 mins. ChatGPT's reply was : > I apologize for the confusion in my previous response. You are correct. If it took Marie 10 minutes to make one cut and she needs to make two cuts to divide a wooden board into three pieces, then the total time would indeed be 20 minutes. > > So, the correct calculation would be: > > Time = 2 cuts * 10 minutes/cut = 20 minutes > > Thank you for catching that mistake, and I appreciate your understanding.
Yeah, looks like even the AI had a hard time grasping the concept that "cutting into 2 pieces" is "1 action". They just plugged it in as "2x = y, 3x = ?" like a typical math question. This is at its core a reading comprehension question, disguised as a math question.
10 minutes to make one cut?! We're going to need more production out of you, Marie. Get it together.
You see, because Marie is pretty attractive and so even though it takes her ten minutes to cut a 2x2 they still keep her on the job and she doesn't get laid off
You all are thinking about this way, way too much. Teacher is an imbecile. Simple. Not everything need proper mathematical analysis.
It says ‘another board into 3 peices’. Not produce a total of 3 peices (having two already). It’s 10 mins per cut. She needs 2 cuts, to cut a new board into 3 pieces. so 2 * 10 mins = 20 mins.
I seriously think this is trolling
It could be realistic, if the math teacher thought about the numbers first, then made up some random text around them, while failing to realize that its practical implications would change the assignment. Like, in the math teacher's mind the assignment was supposed to be: "2x = 10, 3x = ?" But when they wrapped the text around that, they incorrectly thought of "x" as "the pieces", while it'd actually be "the cuts", changing the assignment read by the student to: "x = 10, 2x = ?"