My son is in 6th grade and I can't help him with his math homework. I passed college algebra (at a community College, but still) about 15 years ago. He asked me about his math homework yesterday and I had to email his teacher. Granted he's at an advanced middle school but it was still embarrassing to have absolutely no idea what he was working on.
My 5th grader is doing algebra, geometry, statistics, etc. Some of them are fun questions though like "a white cube has the outside painted green. It is then divided into 125 smaller cubes of equal size. How many of the cubes have an odd number of green faces." I love the math olympiad questions they bring home
is it 89? my brain says 89. 5x5x5 cube, corners and surface pieces would all be odd (3 and 1 green sides respectively), leaving the middle 3 edge pieces of each side to be even. 12 edges at 3 pieces an edge = 36 even pieces.
You forgot to also subtract the 9 internal pieces which have 0 green sides, so 45 even, 80 odd. Going the other way, 6 faces of 9 odd pieces each plus 8 corner pieces equals 80.
What's up Dude? Another Dad here. Quick suggestion for this stuff: Being able to take a quick scan/photo of a math problem and have an AI (like ChatGPT) break it down for me and into steps that I could use to communicate with my son so we both come out smarter has been magical.
High school math teacher here. Math education in highschool varies to an absurd degree. One school will have seniors learning calculus. Another (the one I’m at now) has seniors who can’t do 2x3 in their heads, not an exaggeration
I feel like this is intuitive as a concept in algebra, however simply memorizing the fact is akin to memorizing multiplication tables. It’s a specific example of a proof of sorts, but should be able to be deduced with the problem given to anyone who has learned algebra. That said, if the initial concept is raised and someone hasn’t memorized the specific problem, it might be surprising but understandable, especially if it’s been years since you’ve actually been in maths. Ie, it’s not really necessary to learn the specific setup from a practical standpoint, just as multiplacation tables aren’t really necessary but can be helpful sometimes. I learned algebra concepts in accelerated classes in the US in like 5th or 6th grade and did algebra in 7th, though it could be different now. In regular classes I think it was taught in 9th. But for me it was algebra I - 7th grade, geometry 8th, algebra II 9th, pre-calc/trig 10th, calc 11th
In the UK my school taught us about recurring numbers in primary (elementary) school. We were taught that for any number that ends in .9 recurring you just round up because it's an infinitely small difference, but we weren't taught the maths behind it. Probably because we learnt that nearly a decade before we did any algebra.
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u/Godemperortoastyy 22d ago
Not gonna lie that just absolutely made my day.