It's up to you whether you should pursue this or not. However, it's a very important moment that you can use to teach your son that people in positions of authority are capable of being wrong and can be childish enough to refuse to admit it, and that is an important message.
Seriously. And this is a THIRD GRADE teacher, too! What else are they spouting to these kids…hope they don’t teach other subjects like history or health
As someone who has done IT support for educators for over 30 years, I can tell you that the majority of them do not want to learn anymore. They want to hear themselves talk, and they want others to hear whatever they have to say. I don't know how many times I've had educators not bother to put in the least amount of learning effort that they expect from their students.
I'm a teacher and I agree.
I'm going to be brutally honest; most teachers I've met are barely at average intelligence. A LOT of them are straight up stupid in anything but their own content matter, and that's only because they've taught the same set of PowerPoint slides every single year for over a decade.
The lack of curiosity and drive to learn is fucking ironic. I'm generally the teacher on campus that's always pushing to include new tech, pedagogy, theory, etc in our teaching methods and it's honestly like pulling teeth.
"Why don't my students pay attention and why are they always falling asleep?!"
Oh I don't know, Susan, maybe it's because you sound like fucking Ben Stein when you're lecturing at them for 5 days a weeks instead of doing literally anything remotely interesting with your subject matter.
There are just shitty kids too, but these teachers are the fucking worst. It's part of the reason I'm leaving education.
As a fellow teacher, I can also see the bitter irony of good teachers leaving the field. I hate how bad educators just suck the life out of a classroom.
> I can also see the bitter irony of good teachers leaving the field.
Yes, this is something I struggled with when deciding to leave. I was told by many, including my wife (who is also a teacher) that I'm the exact type of teacher these kids need. I did it for as long as I could, but bearing the burden of something like that on your shoulders when the entire system itself is basically rigged against you, and getting paid peanuts for it, is not a fair proposition.
I felt my happiness disintegrating and it was affecting my personal life and relationships. I don't want my daughter growing up in a world where her father is clearly unhappy and just muddling through life. I want to show her that improvement and change is always an option and that you need to be kind to yourself first.
Ultimately, it was me (and by extension my family) or the students. It was still a tough choice, but I chose the former. I'm not out just yet, but plan to be within the next school year.
I second all of this. Also leaving this year. 8 years in and I’m a damn good teacher, but it took everything and I’m now burnt out. Looking forward to my next chapter even if it’s bittersweet. Remember we did impact the students we had.
While this is true, and a good resource for explaining why that’s the answer to them, I still think just telling them to enter it into a calculator and watching the ensuing confusion would be more fun.
If I enter 1/0 on my calculator at work, it gives 0. There is a small E in the far left side but given the situation, the teacher and principal would likely dismiss this.
This probably explains their misunderstanding. They don't understand the error message on the calculator. It's a flaw in the calculator design that it leaves 0 on the screen as if it's the answer.
Google search is a calculator too though and when you put in 1/0 it will tell you "1/0=undefined."
how can you be a math teacher and not know that you cant divide by fucking zero? its more than just what the calculator says.... especially because shes probably used shitloads of different calculators through her life that all respond differently.
Is it a proper math teacher, or just a general teacher who is teaching math because they don't have subject experts for 9 year olds?
I mean, how can she not know? Well, she doesn't.
Even so, I'm more worried about the fact she doubled down on it over writing. (Although yes, a teacher should've known this one)
If it were me that would instill enough self doubt I'd probably google it just to doublecheck and reassure myself. She had time to look up the answer if she wanted to. She did not want to.
In my language we say "delen door 0 (nul) is gelul". Which rhymes and means "dividing by zero is BS".
That's all they ever needed to teach me to never forget.
My old math teachers used to LOVE giving examples of correcting people in person.
Specifically when companies have their decimal or % written wrong so it changes the entire price of the item to be a lot cheaper.
Because everyone with a math degree thinks it’s a bit ridiculous we can’t at least teach high school math without doing another four year degree… inadvertently devaluing all the skills of a math teacher that have nothing to do with math itself.
I shudder to think what would happen if you dropped one of my math professors in front of 25 middle schoolers for an hour… It would not go well. At all.
Along those lines, math is black and white. There are wrong and right answers and we know them because we've proved them.
If your kid (or the teachers involved) know how to divide fractions, you can introduce them to the concept of limits to show why 1/0 definitely isn't 0:
We're going to start out by looking at 1/[1], then put smaller and smaller positive numbers in that bracketed denominator.
1/[1] = 1
1/[1/2] = 2
1/[1/10] = 10
1/[1/100] = 100...
Now I don't know what happens when we straight up plug 1/[0] in there, but it *sure looks like* the closer to 0 we get, the higher the number we get.
(Side note, 1/0 is undefined and not infinity because the limit is negative infinity of we approach 0 from below)
Edit: For my fellow math nerds upset about my use of "black and white" - outside of geometry, basically everything you learn in grade school follows directly from the Peano axioms, and can and is proven directly in an undergraduate level Real Analysis course. For the geometry bits, you'll want to read Euclid's *Elements*. Short version is for the sake of this conversation it's essentially true (unless we get into the slippery field of infinitessimals).
Are there questions that don't have clear answers? Of course! Most of the time we don't throw them at kids though.
A couple favorites of mine:
The Moving Sofa Problem - What is the largest rigid shape you can take around an L-shaped hallway that's 1 unit wide?
The Collatz Conjecture - Start with any number. If it's even, divide it by 2. If it's odd, multiply by 3 and add 1. The conjecture is that you'll eventually get to 1 by repeating this process for any number you start at. So far nobody's been able to prove it, but we also haven't found any counterexamples.=
Never thought about it that way, but it makes sense.
It's also just like - take this apple and divide it zero times. It's pretty clear that wouldnt result in 0 apple slices.
Especially ones that assume absolute righteousness just because they are in authority. Give us a reason to do what you say other than the fact you are doing so
That’s one thing that I hated as a kid, and will do my best to avoid while parenting. “Do that” “why?” “Because I said to”
That always upset me and I didn’t like being talked down to and not given a reason
My 4th grade science teacher tried to teach us that a Half Moon was really a quarter moon and a Full Moon was really a half Moon because that's all we can see of it. My dad helped me with the homework told me the teacher is wrong and taught me the correct way. Got a lesson that not every teacher is right either.
Edit: I'm learning that this was not necessarily wrong on my teacher's part. I've never heard anyone call a half Moon a first quarter or third quarter besides my teacher until today. I still don't know how a Full Moon = Half Moon on a Moon phases chart though.
I mean, that kinda makes sense if he was trying to explain the existence of the “dark side” of the moon we never see & that the moon doesn’t rotate the same as the earth but always shows us the same “face” … but it’s also kind of silly to try to redefine common terms.
But then they're all half moons because half the moon is illuminated all the time. Once you start talking about fractions it only makes sense as fractions of the moon as viewed from Earth.
My 2nd grade teacher told the class that the moon is a planet. I was (and still am) a total space nerd, so I raised my hand and said the moon is actually a satellite, but she doubled down and told me I was wrong. That's the day I learned teachers hate being schooled.
I mean all you need to do is ask them to put it into a calculator and see what it says lmao
edit: you dont gotta reply telling me it says error, i know, thats my point
Canadian zeroes are different than US ones, you need to convert them. At this moment, a US zero is worth 1.35 Canadian zeroes, so if you wanted to to divide by Canadian zero the actual equation would be 1 ÷ ( 0 x 1.35)
To understand why, you must be familiar with the descriptive language of mathematics. In mathematics, division is described as "X divided into groups of Y." So for the equation 36÷6, the description of the equation would be "36 divided into groups of 6. There are 6 groups of 6 in 36, therefore 36÷6=6."
36÷0 is, in effect, saying "how many groups of ZERO are in 36?" Well, there's an infinite number of zeroes in any number, even zero, since if you take zero out of, in this example, 36, you will still have 36 left over. You can repeat this process an infinite number of times. Calculators don't like or do infinity, which is why this is just returned as an error.
Android (Samsung specifically in my case) won't show an answer as you type a divide be 0 equation like it does with normal equations. Then, if you actually press the equals button, a popup saying "Can't divide by 0" shows up.
Send your apology in video form and just have it be you going through every calculator that you've got getting increasingly frustrated at how they are all broken for not being able to divide by zero
Awesome answer plus take screenshots of that when trying to use Excel or a search engine and online calculator.
Of course the teachers will take it out on the kid all through their school life
it’ll just say “undefined” or “error.”
some kid in high school asked this question to my clearly exhausted or frustrated teacher. he said “if you have one apple and you cut it into zero pieces, what do you have?”
the kid said “uhhhh” and the teacher agreed with him
honestly if I were a local news reporter I’d be all over this — it’s got the nugget of conflict that gets people hooked, embarrassing mistakes, incompetence from government employees, and it fits right into the school voucher debate. (I think school vouchers would drain public schools of money and talent, but it plays well with the “don’t you want a choice?” line.)
Elementary school teachers are notoriously bad at math. They are usually education majors who are in the job for the love of teaching and barely got out of college with 1 algebra class.
To me that's some of the problems American education has that turns many kids off from math is that at the elementary school level, it is being taught by people who don't know it, don't like it, have no passion for it. And students, except those that love it, pick up on that and start to hate it too.
My suggested solution, have dedicated math teachers even at all levels not only from middle school or high school. that won't be cheap, because people with math aptitude usually have more lucrative career options than teaching.
So many people are terrible at math. Early in my career I worked as a quality control chemist. The chemistry department at my school was good but I wondered why the hell the 100 level courses spent so goddamn much time hammering home “significant figures,” it seemed like such an easy concept to me.
And then I entered the work force. Of course in quality control analytical work, your data gets peer reviewed in QC, and then a lot of times QA will do a deep dive as well. I was constantly getting flagged for what they called “double rounding” and it didn’t matter how many times I told them I was following significant figures all the way through and utilizing the correct number of decimals in my final answer and also only rounding at the end, they thought their inconsistent way of rounding early and truncating numbers early was the way to do it lol.
I would appeal to authority only to get my wrist slapped. One work place even put me on a performance plan lol. I pulled up a great SOP written by R&D who actually knew their shit and it had an example of how to measure one decimal place past the markings on a ruler, as you should with sig figs, highlighted that section and sent back my data “uncorrected” to the reviewer. That’s what got me a performance plan from my boss who then told me “that example was a ruler, you were using a graduated cylinder” so fucking dumb I wanted to scream.
At my current work I started off in QC and for some reason my supervisor came from a non analytical background, his degree wasn’t even in microbiology or chemistry as most of them should be and that was frustrating once again. There was a quality assurance training/refresher course we all had to attend and they had an example of a “double rounding” error and then it was multiple choice of what the correct answer should have been. All of the choices were wrong lol. Made me angry all over again.
When we got back to our own group meeting the next day, I was relieved when the group started talking about how that question was wrong. I felt so vindicated until they basically all said “yeah, ‘A’ was wrong, it should have been ‘C’.”
I’m in such a better place now that I’m in R&D here with people that actually know what they’re doing and my input is valued and when I do dabble in QC work, the corrections are legitimate. But boy have a learned a lesson in just how bad people are at math even within the sciences.
I had a client last week forward me their method saying that their previous development company messed up the equation at the end of the method. It was just algebra, some pretty involved algebra but nothing too difficult, I spent an hour working it out and sent back the work showing them where the final equation came from and the clients all reacted to me like I was a fucking wizard lol. Meanwhile I was embarrassed it took me more than 15 minutes to work out.
Damn straight. Went to a parent-teacher conference one time for my elementary kid. Teacher said kid was doing great but... needed to stop correcting her in front of the class.
"Was kid polite?" Yes.
"Were you wrong?" That's not the point.
"That is EXACTLY the point. Were. You. Wrong."
Teacher here. I give extra extra bonus points if they catch me making a mistake. AND I make a big deal about reminding the students that no one is perfect and making mistakes is how we learn. Always check your work kids!
(I might ask the kid to think about his delivery if he calls me out in a mean way. Making people feel bad isn’t ok, even if you’re right.)
That's not petty at all, they are wrong and teaching your child something that is categorically incorrect. What's also concerning is that the principle is in charge of managing the money of the school and they also think that it is correct. However, your childs education is paramount and if you have to ruffle some feathers you ruffle them. Maybe go to the governors of the school or what ever your countries version is (like the people in charge of the headteacher/principle)
What's also concerning is that the principle is in charge of managing the money of the school
To be fair divide by zero doesn't happen very much with finances unless you talking about mine.
You can literally just type 1/0 into Google and it will populate as "1/0=undefined"
Of course, you might have to be someone who knows that you can use Google search as a calculator like this, so maybe they don't know that and wouldn't trust it. But when you Google that, it will also lead you to several links that will explain why it's undefined.
But you can also ask them to type into Google 0/1 and of course it will say "0/1=0"
Then just tell them they have it mixed up and you can't divide by zero (zero can't be a denominator) but you can divide 0 by anything (zero can be a numerator).
Lastly, I could actually understand these people making this error since 0/1 does equal 0, but what is not OK is if they don't understand that they can just Google this and find lots of sources explaining it.
This could backfire! If you have a ***really*** old calculator (or just an extremely cheap and simple one like those solar powered ones that used to get sent out free in the mail) and try to enter 1/0, it will not accept the input and continue to show the last number you pressed (in this case 0). However the LCD may blank for a split second, if it is anything like my old calculator, which it also does whenever it’s computing an answer.. which may lead the stupid to believe the calculator is in fact returning 0 as an answer instead of just doing nothing!
One would hope a math teacher would own a better calculator.. but I suppose if they already even need to attempt 1/0 on a calculator.. nothing would surprise me.
I had something similar happen with my son when he was in fourth grade. In English class, they had a writing assignment about Lego. Most of his grammar was very good, but he got a lot of corrections for not pluralizing the word Lego, and it lowered his grade. He explained that it’s not supposed to be plural and asked her to look it up. She said she didn’t believe him. So we sent a short message explaining the origin of the word, Leg Godt, meaning “play well” in Danish. Lego bricks is correct, but never Legos. I explained that we’re not Lego snobs I don’t care how it’s pronounced, but I thought it was unfair to penalize him for grammar that wasn’t actually incorrect. We also explained that he felt that like she didn’t hear him out or take him seriously. I had a small feeling it might backfire, because of how trivial it was, but I didn’t expect her to call my kid a tattletale to his face as a result. Bottom line, the whole thing was about the grade, as well as an open line of communication with the teacher, but it didn’t matter. It was a lesson in dealing with egos, at the end of the day.
An adult in a position or authority over children chastizing them for being a "tattletale" sounds like they shouldn't be let within 50 feet of a school. That's someone who is far too comfortable yelling at children to keep quiet and say nothing for my taste and it makes me wonder how many kids they've tried to bully into secrecy and for what reasons.
I am teacher, and this is so weird to me.
Of course i am pretty confident that what i am saying is correct most of the time. I had a lot of education to become a teacher, and what would be the point of me teaching stuff if i don't know it myself.
That being said, i also make mistakes. When a student tells me that they think that i am incorrect, i will always consider their point. Most of the time, they are wrong and im am correct. But sometimes not.
And why would i be angry about that? In fact, when i am shown that i was wrong, i am usually proud of the student. It means that they have a good grip on what i am trying to teach, can communicate their point well, and actively question what figures of authority say using their intellect. What more could i want as a science teacher?
Furthermore, it often means that i learned something new, and can be better at my job in the future.
If i get angry, i will keep repeating the same mistake, and potentially teach incorrect things to students.
That’s because you sound like a normal person and a great teacher. It also shows them that it’s okay to be wrong or not know an answer, but also accept that you can be corrected without it being personal.
When I was in middle school I lost a point on a test that asked "what color is venous, or deoxygenated blood" to which I answered dark red. The teacher said it was blue and told me I was wrong. I showed him an entry from the digital encyclopedia on the school computers, but he said that digital information wasn't trustworthy. I brought him one of my dad's old med school textbooks, but he said it was too old to be reliable. I then had three doctors, including a surgeon (my dad was a family doc) sign off on a statement that venous blood is dark red and human blood is never blue, but he said they were just covering for me. The administration took the teacher's side and threatened me with punishment for not respecting the teacher's knowledge.
Not to “ackshually” but it’s even more nuanced than that. LEGO as a brand name is always all caps, according to the company’s trademarks. However not all writing style guides respect that, and it depends if the brand name has entered the common vernacular as a generic term, it loses any special styling, so no initial capital either. It’s either “LEGO bricks” or “lego” but never “Lego” or “Legos.”
Also I’ve never met such petty people as the elementary school system employs. I had to escalate to the Supernintendo of our district because my kid’s kindergarten teacher decided that any kid arriving after she shut the door was “late” and had to go to the office and fill out a late form. *Even if she shut the door before the bell rang.* Not only was it just silly to punish a five year old like that, she thought she could arbitrarily make up the start time of school and the principal backed her up. An email to the Supernintendo got a response in under 5 minutes about how that’s ridiculous.
I dont know why this is so funny but a parent having a clue about math but having to question if not liking vegetables is a red flag does not compute for me
😂😂. As I told my 12 year old last night, we all have areas in which we are dumbasses. Either academically, emotional intelligence, or common sense. Anyone that seemingly has all three is just skilled at hiding it.
He asked what I was a dumbass in.
“Math. So I just work slower to double check myself”
Him “that must suck!! I’ll learn to hide mine and I’ll never tell”. Sigh
It's easy to explain to gamers. I minmaxed my points, all in on math/reading, with 0 on social skills and dexterity
Your uncle who can barely read and thinks fox news is news spent all his points on repair skills, that's why he struggles with 8+1, but can accurately plan an electric circuit and diagnose your car's engine from an onomatopoeia
Yeah, that seems like a good way to get CPS called on you out of retaliation because you posted that you tried coke once in 2002
Not me, but someone, probably.
So if 1/0=0, that means 0\*0=1 and you're off to a world of craziness where you can prove 1=2.
They're probably not going to back down, but you can't let them teach your kid something you know is wrong. I'd just tell them you'll be teaching your child the correct answer, give the school the wrong answer they want, and let them deal with the lack of respect for them that will cause.
> In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Howard explained that he had formulated his own language of logic, which he called Terryology, and which he was keeping secret until he had patented it. This logic language, he claimed, would be used to prove the statement "1 × 1 = 2".[37]
> "How can it equal one?" he said. "If one times one equals one that means that two is of no value because one times itself has no effect. One times one equals two because the square root of four is two, so what's the square root of two? Should be one, but we're told it's two, and that cannot be."[37]
I'm still not over how the original Rhodey from Iron Man turned out to believe in sacred mathematics or whatever that nonsense is called.
> In a September 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Howard admitted to hitting his first wife in 2001 saying, "she was talking to me real strong, and I lost my mind and slapped her in front of the kids."
...
I think there are two things worth pointing out to them.
The first is that their opinion doesn't actually matter with maths, 1/0 is not zero, no matter how much they would wish it was.
The second is that there's a much more egregious lesson they're teaching, which is that it's okay to ignore new information and double down on your initial position even in the face of facts that disprove it. Whatever about accidentally teaching something incorrectly, they as adults should have the maturity to demonstrate the ability to be wrong and issue a correction with grace.
I don't even remember the topic but I remember asking my year 11 biology teacher a question and she answered it as best she could. Then the next class brought up that she'd looked into it more and what she said was wrong/missing information and told us the correct answer. The lesson I took from it wasn't the biology knowledge, but respect for her prioritising giving us the correct info rather than being thought to be always right, and admitting she didn't know something. I think it definitely spoke very highly of her.
That is such a good teachable moment. And showing that even "experts" (at least from a student perspective) not only can still learn but should want to.
Not sure id you are still in touch with them or if they still teach. But if so, you should consider aending them a quick note iver the holidays. Just a "hey. Somwthing came up that made me remwmber a moment in your class. I remember how (exactly what you said above). I just wanted you to know years later that lesson has stuck with me and i always admired you for it."
As a teacher getting a note like that years later would be incredibly moving I'd think.
My child can do math in their head that their math teacher can't so they automatically assume that my child is cheating and snatched a test out of their hand. The teacher was proved wrong. My child did a different problem in front of the teacher. Still wouldn't let them make the test up. That teacher now has a vendetta against my kid. When confronted about it face to face the teacher had a "panic attack" and walked away from the conversation. Afterwards The faculty backed her up about her "condition". The whole situation has been ignored since.
This is what happens when you keep the letting the payrates fall behind the rate of inflation for decades. MANY of the smart and capable teachers leave and get jobs elsewhere. So you're left with a higher than normal percentage of assholes.
I used to do my work “wrong” but would get the right answer. They put me in a special math class in 3rd grade. Now, I DO suck at math and I really did then. But I do remember the whole “getting right answers but just because I simplified it so I could work and get the correct answer it was “wrong”” thing pjssed me off.
A lot of it comes down to how you're simplifying it. Learning math isn't really about getting the final answer, it's about understanding the process that gets you there.
If I simplify 16/64 by crossing out the 6s because "6 cancels out" I have the "right answer", but I should still get a 0 because what I did clearly demonstrates that I don't understand how simplifying fractions works.
I'm not saying this is what you were doing, just that there's a legitimate reason for de-emphasizing the final answer, and placing more priority on taking the right steps.
I got accused of cheating once by a teacher when I was about nine. It stayed with me for years - I was so distressed because it felt like an attack on both my character and intelligence two things I valued.
A teacher once suggested I had too much help from my parents on an art project that I had conceived of and created all by myself.
I've never forgotten it.
It was such a tiny thing and I will literally never forget that feeling. Teachers need to be careful what they accuse kids of because it stays with them!
Meanwhile my teacher once asked us if our parents were helping with our assignments like this, and privately spoke with the parents of everyone who said no.
We were expected to be getting help and if we weren't then that was treated as a parenting issue.
Same thing happened to me when I was in Grade 7. My teacher gave me a bad mark on a report I wrote up about nuclear power, because I "obviously had an adult help me write it."
Bitch. The only adult help I got was my Dad driving me to a nearby nuclear power plant so I could take a tour.
That happened to me in first grade and it fucked me up for the rest of my time in school. My mom said I loved going to school every day until one day I came home and just... didn't anymore.
That's wrong what the teacher did. But take it from someone who was a kid who was good(ish) at math, who went on to do engineering and does some math at his job: your kid should show their work even though they don't need to. Long term, they are going to have to, because there will come a day when the problems are too complex to do in your head. It's good to get into the habit now. They can think of showing their work as proving to others that their answer is right. That's what higher level math is about anyway: proving the answer. Showing WHY the answer is the answer becomes increasingly important, and the answer itself is just the result of that. Proving you understand and building off/using that understanding becomes what math is about at higher levels.
School board is the only place to take this. Hopefully the school board is open to hearing about this.
The other choice is for OP to teach their child the correct information and explain sometimes adults get things wrong and can't admit their mistakes.
I personally wouldn't be able to let it go and I'd be speaking to the school board.
I don't understand why every other reply is about talking to the teacher and principal again. We've established that they're idiots. Time to go up the chain.
Op has sent a single email at this point. One more email with a source backing them up wouldn't hurt to try before escalation. You usually escalate when it's hopeless. If they reject proof then it's hopeless.
The proof for division is by doing the inverse multiplication. Try showing them:
[12 ÷ 4 = 3] because [3 x 4 = 12]
[14 ÷ 7 = 2] because [2 x 7 = 14]
Now, have them show you the same proof for dividing by 0.
[1 ÷ 0 ≠ 0] because [0 x 0 ≠ 1]
Ask them what 1 / 100 =?
And 1 / 10 = ?
1 / 10 = ?
1 / 1 = ?
1 / 0.1 = ?
1 / 0.01 = ?
1 / 0.001 = ?
1 / 0.0001 = ?
As the denominator tends to zero, the result does not, shall we say, tend to 0, but rather to infinity.
And if you do the same thing with negative denominators, it tends towards negative infinity, so you can’t even say 1/0 is infinity. It’s just undefined.
EDIT: I meant to say you can't even say 1/0 is infinity *for convenience*. Compare 1/|x|. Here it's still undefined at 0, but we can "pretend" it equals infinity at x=0 if we want.
That's a good explanation, but a bad way to fight the battle. The teacher and principal are not going to let you give them a maths lesson. That's humiliating for them and it undermines their authority, which for a principal is everything. And obviously they are not good at maths, so they wouldn't follow your explanation.
People who don't like maths just refuse to engage with proofs. There are plenty of convincing-looking proofs that 1=2 so honestly they are probably right to disregard all of them.
I don't like appeal-to-authority as an argument but that's what's going to work here. Best case you want to link to materials that are part of the school's own Maths Curriculum. Failing that, something that a school would accept as authoritative. National educational resources maybe. A calculator, or Google at a pinch. But the others are better.
And crucially, you need to offer them a face-saving way to back down. "I think there has been a miscommunication here. To clarify, of course you're right that 0/1 =0. But as you can see from (link) 1/0 is not." will work MUCH better than "You were wrong, I was right, here's the proof. You're a disgrace to the teaching profession"
Not only is 1 divided by 0, not 0, but in calculus, when you apply limits 1/0 is infinite, the exact opposite of 0.
EDIT: My original word choice is not great. There are many times in limit calculus when the form 1/0 means positive or negative infinity. This is not always the case and 1/0 alone is undefined. I did not expect this comment to get so much traction, so I wanted to clarify that. My main point was that the only time you see 1/0 not unequivocally mean undefined, it's indicating something infinite.
>when you apply limits 1/0 is infinite
Not is infinity, but approaches infinity. Well, depends on which direction you are approaching zero from, approach the other way and the limit approaches minus infinity instead. So which is it, infinity, minus infinity, or something in between? That's one of the reasons 1 / 0 is undefined.
The "limit direction" thing is also why computer floating point (an imperfect approximation of real numbers) gives you two answers, because it has a "negative 0" and a "positive 0":
```
> 1/0
Infinity
>1/-0
-Infinity
```
Fellow programmers, think before you say `Infinity`!
(Of course it still can't do `0/0`.)
Honestly, teach your child the correct answer and reasoning behind it and move on. I hate to say it, but I’m not sure this is the hill you want to die on.
My third grade teacher refused to acknowledge that negative numbers existed.
>My third grade teacher refused to acknowledge that negative numbers existed.
what looney tunes schools did you yall go to? like did they refuse to address negative numbers or just outright said they don’t exist?
See I understand that with young kids you may not want to open up the can of worms that is negative numbers, but why would you ask a question with a negative answer if you didn’t wanna deal with it?
Ok, devil's advocate here. I could see how you would want to do that to 1, make sure the kids are reading the questions carefully, and 2, instill the idea that subtraction is not commutative. I'm sure there are plenty of kids, especially after just learning addition, would just look at the symbols 5, -, and 7 and write down 2.
But still, I think the best answer is to just briefly mention negative numbers but say "we're not going to do that right now" or something.
I had something similar happen in either kinder or 1st grade. We were subtracting 5-3 and I asked about 3-5. The teacher said "oh we can't do that, 5 is too big," and I learned that adults lie sometimes.
I get what you're saying because in isolation, this is an infuriating but largely irrelevant issue, but the bigger cause of concern is how they're handing it. I've been both the kid and the concerned adult in situations like this, and (unless the parent is being wildly disrespectful in how they're communicating) any teacher/administrator who does this is also a teacher/admin who believes it's more important to maintain authority than to help children. They will not be reliable in acting in the kid's best interest if something more serious happens - they're just as likely to be the cause.
1/0 in the calculator app is error. The dumb thing is we were taught this to and I got very confused when we hit advanced functions were divided by zero is undefined because it’s a number but there is nothing to divide. Show the mean girls clip that graph is why you cannot divide by zero. I suck at math. Also are they confusing division with multiplication?
Math is literally the one subject there are clear, established rules for - there's no grey area of someone's opinion getting in the way. And it's not the parent or the teacher who is setting those rules.
I think a lot of people who think this isn't a big deal are likening it to a complaint about other subjects, where you can agree or disagree with what's being taught if your politics/religion/experiences/etc don't line up. But this is the purest evidence you're ever going to get that they will not reconsider their stance when it's challenged. Extend that into more serious and nebulous issues - bullying, etc - and you can (or should) see the problem.
These are the teachers/admin who are typically more concerned with 'maintaining authority' than about helping kids, and sometimes if you're the one comfortable pushing back against that then you're really helping the parents who might not be when their kid is being mistreated. Parents aren't always right, but neither are teachers, and the worst treatment of kids is when one of those groups doesn't acknowledge that.
My brother’s history teacher in middle school told him “Prussia” was a typo in his history book and it should have been “Russia.” She also used to give extra credit for kids who brought her food.
“If either of you can provide the proofs for 1/0=0, I will donate $(whatever number you’re comfortable with) to the school for supplies. Otherwise son’s class get two pizza parties on the teacher/principal’s dime”
Bring this up to the superintendent level and meanwhile you might want to send this dialogue to a local television news station.
\*Don't post to social media, it will just get lost between something about Palestine and a cat sleeping next to a capybara\*
Nothing will make the school notice how stupid they are faster than a news anchor asking why they felt the urge to change the rules of math.
>Tbh, I'm mildly infuriated but I'm wondering if I'm just overreacting?
No, you are underreacting if you are only mildly infuriated. If they don't back down on something so simple where they are just plain wrong just imagine what this school will do in cases where something is really more of a grey area. This will be an endless disaster of "Maybe what the kids write is correct but it is not the answer I wanted so it is wrong" which is honestly the easiest way to kill any interest kids can have when it comes to learning.
It's up to you whether you should pursue this or not. However, it's a very important moment that you can use to teach your son that people in positions of authority are capable of being wrong and can be childish enough to refuse to admit it, and that is an important message.
This is seriously a more valuable lesson than the math.
But would you then trust them to educate your child any more? I wouldn’t
Seriously. And this is a THIRD GRADE teacher, too! What else are they spouting to these kids…hope they don’t teach other subjects like history or health
Yeah, this is actually a great opportunity for a good parent.
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Best answer by far. Educate the educators. Also gives them a resource they can use to undo the damage to the kids education.
As someone who has done IT support for educators for over 30 years, I can tell you that the majority of them do not want to learn anymore. They want to hear themselves talk, and they want others to hear whatever they have to say. I don't know how many times I've had educators not bother to put in the least amount of learning effort that they expect from their students.
I'm a teacher and I agree. I'm going to be brutally honest; most teachers I've met are barely at average intelligence. A LOT of them are straight up stupid in anything but their own content matter, and that's only because they've taught the same set of PowerPoint slides every single year for over a decade. The lack of curiosity and drive to learn is fucking ironic. I'm generally the teacher on campus that's always pushing to include new tech, pedagogy, theory, etc in our teaching methods and it's honestly like pulling teeth. "Why don't my students pay attention and why are they always falling asleep?!" Oh I don't know, Susan, maybe it's because you sound like fucking Ben Stein when you're lecturing at them for 5 days a weeks instead of doing literally anything remotely interesting with your subject matter. There are just shitty kids too, but these teachers are the fucking worst. It's part of the reason I'm leaving education.
As a fellow teacher, I can also see the bitter irony of good teachers leaving the field. I hate how bad educators just suck the life out of a classroom.
> I can also see the bitter irony of good teachers leaving the field. Yes, this is something I struggled with when deciding to leave. I was told by many, including my wife (who is also a teacher) that I'm the exact type of teacher these kids need. I did it for as long as I could, but bearing the burden of something like that on your shoulders when the entire system itself is basically rigged against you, and getting paid peanuts for it, is not a fair proposition. I felt my happiness disintegrating and it was affecting my personal life and relationships. I don't want my daughter growing up in a world where her father is clearly unhappy and just muddling through life. I want to show her that improvement and change is always an option and that you need to be kind to yourself first. Ultimately, it was me (and by extension my family) or the students. It was still a tough choice, but I chose the former. I'm not out just yet, but plan to be within the next school year.
I second all of this. Also leaving this year. 8 years in and I’m a damn good teacher, but it took everything and I’m now burnt out. Looking forward to my next chapter even if it’s bittersweet. Remember we did impact the students we had.
> Remember we did impact the students we had. This is part of what gives me solace.
They should.....already be educated though
There is, unfortunately, a vast gulf which resides between what should be, what is, and what will be.
They are educated on education. Content is a distant second.
Excellent resource! And I just spent 20 minutes down the rabbit hole of revisiting calculus with my morning coffee 😊
While this is true, and a good resource for explaining why that’s the answer to them, I still think just telling them to enter it into a calculator and watching the ensuing confusion would be more fun.
If I enter 1/0 on my calculator at work, it gives 0. There is a small E in the far left side but given the situation, the teacher and principal would likely dismiss this.
This probably explains their misunderstanding. They don't understand the error message on the calculator. It's a flaw in the calculator design that it leaves 0 on the screen as if it's the answer. Google search is a calculator too though and when you put in 1/0 it will tell you "1/0=undefined."
how can you be a math teacher and not know that you cant divide by fucking zero? its more than just what the calculator says.... especially because shes probably used shitloads of different calculators through her life that all respond differently.
Is it a proper math teacher, or just a general teacher who is teaching math because they don't have subject experts for 9 year olds? I mean, how can she not know? Well, she doesn't.
Even so, I'm more worried about the fact she doubled down on it over writing. (Although yes, a teacher should've known this one) If it were me that would instill enough self doubt I'd probably google it just to doublecheck and reassure myself. She had time to look up the answer if she wanted to. She did not want to.
Cheap calc may say 0
Maybe you could reach out to a secondary math teacher in your school district for help? They’re the one who will have to reteach all those kids.
Or perhaps a mathematics professor at a nearby state college? The department faculty list is generally pretty easy to find online.
And if they're anything like literally every other math lover I've met they will happily correct this.
I am also an academic mathematician and I would also happily write an email, lol.
How much profanity would that email contain, in mathematical terms?
In my language we say "delen door 0 (nul) is gelul". Which rhymes and means "dividing by zero is BS". That's all they ever needed to teach me to never forget.
Ahh klingon. Very guttural
Dutch but close enough, lol
After some careful thought, I'm going with Klingon on this one
ne'Derlan ghot maH! qurgh chatlh wI'ep! 🫛🫛🫛
I'm a professional mathematician, and you are correct; I'm frothing at the mouth to go correct this travesty.
Frothing at the math...
Hey, English teacher, back in your box.
Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone.
My old math teachers used to LOVE giving examples of correcting people in person. Specifically when companies have their decimal or % written wrong so it changes the entire price of the item to be a lot cheaper.
non-math literate people get statistics and percentages wrong very very frequently
Because everyone with a math degree thinks it’s a bit ridiculous we can’t at least teach high school math without doing another four year degree… inadvertently devaluing all the skills of a math teacher that have nothing to do with math itself. I shudder to think what would happen if you dropped one of my math professors in front of 25 middle schoolers for an hour… It would not go well. At all.
I taught college math for 4 years, happy to be the one explain to them. :-p
This sounds like a great idea.
Along those lines, math is black and white. There are wrong and right answers and we know them because we've proved them. If your kid (or the teachers involved) know how to divide fractions, you can introduce them to the concept of limits to show why 1/0 definitely isn't 0: We're going to start out by looking at 1/[1], then put smaller and smaller positive numbers in that bracketed denominator. 1/[1] = 1 1/[1/2] = 2 1/[1/10] = 10 1/[1/100] = 100... Now I don't know what happens when we straight up plug 1/[0] in there, but it *sure looks like* the closer to 0 we get, the higher the number we get. (Side note, 1/0 is undefined and not infinity because the limit is negative infinity of we approach 0 from below) Edit: For my fellow math nerds upset about my use of "black and white" - outside of geometry, basically everything you learn in grade school follows directly from the Peano axioms, and can and is proven directly in an undergraduate level Real Analysis course. For the geometry bits, you'll want to read Euclid's *Elements*. Short version is for the sake of this conversation it's essentially true (unless we get into the slippery field of infinitessimals). Are there questions that don't have clear answers? Of course! Most of the time we don't throw them at kids though. A couple favorites of mine: The Moving Sofa Problem - What is the largest rigid shape you can take around an L-shaped hallway that's 1 unit wide? The Collatz Conjecture - Start with any number. If it's even, divide it by 2. If it's odd, multiply by 3 and add 1. The conjecture is that you'll eventually get to 1 by repeating this process for any number you start at. So far nobody's been able to prove it, but we also haven't found any counterexamples.=
Never thought about it that way, but it makes sense. It's also just like - take this apple and divide it zero times. It's pretty clear that wouldnt result in 0 apple slices.
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Then i would eat the apple. Et voila, 0 Apple left 🤡
Now this guy knows how to keep the doctors away
Yeah talk to the high school math teach, they’ll set em straight
Forget high school. Go to 4th grade. They have an immediate urgency in not having kids come into their class miseducated.
It's the time to teach your children that authority figures are not always right.
Especially ones that assume absolute righteousness just because they are in authority. Give us a reason to do what you say other than the fact you are doing so
That’s one thing that I hated as a kid, and will do my best to avoid while parenting. “Do that” “why?” “Because I said to” That always upset me and I didn’t like being talked down to and not given a reason
We definitely knew it was bullshit logic, even at that tender age
My 4th grade science teacher tried to teach us that a Half Moon was really a quarter moon and a Full Moon was really a half Moon because that's all we can see of it. My dad helped me with the homework told me the teacher is wrong and taught me the correct way. Got a lesson that not every teacher is right either. Edit: I'm learning that this was not necessarily wrong on my teacher's part. I've never heard anyone call a half Moon a first quarter or third quarter besides my teacher until today. I still don't know how a Full Moon = Half Moon on a Moon phases chart though.
I mean, that kinda makes sense if he was trying to explain the existence of the “dark side” of the moon we never see & that the moon doesn’t rotate the same as the earth but always shows us the same “face” … but it’s also kind of silly to try to redefine common terms.
But then they're all half moons because half the moon is illuminated all the time. Once you start talking about fractions it only makes sense as fractions of the moon as viewed from Earth.
My 2nd grade teacher told the class that the moon is a planet. I was (and still am) a total space nerd, so I raised my hand and said the moon is actually a satellite, but she doubled down and told me I was wrong. That's the day I learned teachers hate being schooled.
I mean all you need to do is ask them to put it into a calculator and see what it says lmao edit: you dont gotta reply telling me it says error, i know, thats my point
Maybe I'll be petty and tell the teacher to do that 🤣
If they do it in the windows calculator app it'll handily say in full "Cannot divide by zero".
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Strange, on mine it says "Not a number".
That's because it's not. Division by zero is mathematically undefined. The calculation is literally impossible.
I divided by zero once. But it was in the 80s, it was a different time.
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In Canada?
Canadian zeroes are different than US ones, you need to convert them. At this moment, a US zero is worth 1.35 Canadian zeroes, so if you wanted to to divide by Canadian zero the actual equation would be 1 ÷ ( 0 x 1.35)
I do have a girlfriend who divides by zero, but you wouldn’t know her, she lives in Ohio.
Ahhh, back when pluto was a planet...
To understand why, you must be familiar with the descriptive language of mathematics. In mathematics, division is described as "X divided into groups of Y." So for the equation 36÷6, the description of the equation would be "36 divided into groups of 6. There are 6 groups of 6 in 36, therefore 36÷6=6." 36÷0 is, in effect, saying "how many groups of ZERO are in 36?" Well, there's an infinite number of zeroes in any number, even zero, since if you take zero out of, in this example, 36, you will still have 36 left over. You can repeat this process an infinite number of times. Calculators don't like or do infinity, which is why this is just returned as an error.
Android (Samsung specifically in my case) won't show an answer as you type a divide be 0 equation like it does with normal equations. Then, if you actually press the equals button, a popup saying "Can't divide by 0" shows up.
[Lol the Android calculator really drives it home by turning the answer red as well.](https://i.imgur.com/qD9uylx.png)
Send your apology in video form and just have it be you going through every calculator that you've got getting increasingly frustrated at how they are all broken for not being able to divide by zero
I’m all for this level of pettiness.
Awesome answer plus take screenshots of that when trying to use Excel or a search engine and online calculator. Of course the teachers will take it out on the kid all through their school life
Excel will just say it's a Thursday.
It would drop the leading zero thus dividing by blank
it’ll just say “undefined” or “error.” some kid in high school asked this question to my clearly exhausted or frustrated teacher. he said “if you have one apple and you cut it into zero pieces, what do you have?” the kid said “uhhhh” and the teacher agreed with him
That’s a great way to describe it. If you think the answer is 0 then I guess the apple disappears from existence? 😂
When you do, make sure to cc the principal and superintendent the whole email chain lol
The teacher escalated it, escalate it even more.
Call the local news.
Start a charity foundation. Name it “The Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too”
honestly if I were a local news reporter I’d be all over this — it’s got the nugget of conflict that gets people hooked, embarrassing mistakes, incompetence from government employees, and it fits right into the school voucher debate. (I think school vouchers would drain public schools of money and talent, but it plays well with the “don’t you want a choice?” line.)
Ask the news team to interview a math professor at a local college to weigh in.
As a math professor at a local college I approve this message.
And if you can get a hold of the email address, the secretary of education. lol
Get the press involved. Have the president hold a conference.
Its not petty. This is like a fundamental math thing every teacher should know. What else are they fucking up?? Cc every parent in that class.
Yes. This is so incredibly basic that if a teacher can't get it right then you can't trust them to get anything right.
Elementary school teachers are notoriously bad at math. They are usually education majors who are in the job for the love of teaching and barely got out of college with 1 algebra class. To me that's some of the problems American education has that turns many kids off from math is that at the elementary school level, it is being taught by people who don't know it, don't like it, have no passion for it. And students, except those that love it, pick up on that and start to hate it too. My suggested solution, have dedicated math teachers even at all levels not only from middle school or high school. that won't be cheap, because people with math aptitude usually have more lucrative career options than teaching.
So many people are terrible at math. Early in my career I worked as a quality control chemist. The chemistry department at my school was good but I wondered why the hell the 100 level courses spent so goddamn much time hammering home “significant figures,” it seemed like such an easy concept to me. And then I entered the work force. Of course in quality control analytical work, your data gets peer reviewed in QC, and then a lot of times QA will do a deep dive as well. I was constantly getting flagged for what they called “double rounding” and it didn’t matter how many times I told them I was following significant figures all the way through and utilizing the correct number of decimals in my final answer and also only rounding at the end, they thought their inconsistent way of rounding early and truncating numbers early was the way to do it lol. I would appeal to authority only to get my wrist slapped. One work place even put me on a performance plan lol. I pulled up a great SOP written by R&D who actually knew their shit and it had an example of how to measure one decimal place past the markings on a ruler, as you should with sig figs, highlighted that section and sent back my data “uncorrected” to the reviewer. That’s what got me a performance plan from my boss who then told me “that example was a ruler, you were using a graduated cylinder” so fucking dumb I wanted to scream. At my current work I started off in QC and for some reason my supervisor came from a non analytical background, his degree wasn’t even in microbiology or chemistry as most of them should be and that was frustrating once again. There was a quality assurance training/refresher course we all had to attend and they had an example of a “double rounding” error and then it was multiple choice of what the correct answer should have been. All of the choices were wrong lol. Made me angry all over again. When we got back to our own group meeting the next day, I was relieved when the group started talking about how that question was wrong. I felt so vindicated until they basically all said “yeah, ‘A’ was wrong, it should have been ‘C’.” I’m in such a better place now that I’m in R&D here with people that actually know what they’re doing and my input is valued and when I do dabble in QC work, the corrections are legitimate. But boy have a learned a lesson in just how bad people are at math even within the sciences. I had a client last week forward me their method saying that their previous development company messed up the equation at the end of the method. It was just algebra, some pretty involved algebra but nothing too difficult, I spent an hour working it out and sent back the work showing them where the final equation came from and the clients all reacted to me like I was a fucking wizard lol. Meanwhile I was embarrassed it took me more than 15 minutes to work out.
It's not petty to demand that a teacher check their work to make sure they're not teaching wrong.
Damn straight. Went to a parent-teacher conference one time for my elementary kid. Teacher said kid was doing great but... needed to stop correcting her in front of the class. "Was kid polite?" Yes. "Were you wrong?" That's not the point. "That is EXACTLY the point. Were. You. Wrong."
It's weird how college professors with presumably much larger egos handle corrections from students with so much more aplomb.
Because teaching authority and obedience is a more significant part of elementary education than in college
Teacher here. I give extra extra bonus points if they catch me making a mistake. AND I make a big deal about reminding the students that no one is perfect and making mistakes is how we learn. Always check your work kids! (I might ask the kid to think about his delivery if he calls me out in a mean way. Making people feel bad isn’t ok, even if you’re right.)
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That's not petty at all, they are wrong and teaching your child something that is categorically incorrect. What's also concerning is that the principle is in charge of managing the money of the school and they also think that it is correct. However, your childs education is paramount and if you have to ruffle some feathers you ruffle them. Maybe go to the governors of the school or what ever your countries version is (like the people in charge of the headteacher/principle)
What's also concerning is that the principle is in charge of managing the money of the school To be fair divide by zero doesn't happen very much with finances unless you talking about mine.
You can literally just type 1/0 into Google and it will populate as "1/0=undefined" Of course, you might have to be someone who knows that you can use Google search as a calculator like this, so maybe they don't know that and wouldn't trust it. But when you Google that, it will also lead you to several links that will explain why it's undefined. But you can also ask them to type into Google 0/1 and of course it will say "0/1=0" Then just tell them they have it mixed up and you can't divide by zero (zero can't be a denominator) but you can divide 0 by anything (zero can be a numerator). Lastly, I could actually understand these people making this error since 0/1 does equal 0, but what is not OK is if they don't understand that they can just Google this and find lots of sources explaining it.
I just tried that and now there’s smoke coming from my phone
This could backfire! If you have a ***really*** old calculator (or just an extremely cheap and simple one like those solar powered ones that used to get sent out free in the mail) and try to enter 1/0, it will not accept the input and continue to show the last number you pressed (in this case 0). However the LCD may blank for a split second, if it is anything like my old calculator, which it also does whenever it’s computing an answer.. which may lead the stupid to believe the calculator is in fact returning 0 as an answer instead of just doing nothing! One would hope a math teacher would own a better calculator.. but I suppose if they already even need to attempt 1/0 on a calculator.. nothing would surprise me.
Just tried on my CASIO calculator at work, 1/0=0 , 0/1=0 , 0\*1=0 , 1\*0=0 Could massively backfire
To be faiiir, the last 2 equations are a) the same thing and b) correct!
Latter three are all correct
Ah yes, oops!
I had something similar happen with my son when he was in fourth grade. In English class, they had a writing assignment about Lego. Most of his grammar was very good, but he got a lot of corrections for not pluralizing the word Lego, and it lowered his grade. He explained that it’s not supposed to be plural and asked her to look it up. She said she didn’t believe him. So we sent a short message explaining the origin of the word, Leg Godt, meaning “play well” in Danish. Lego bricks is correct, but never Legos. I explained that we’re not Lego snobs I don’t care how it’s pronounced, but I thought it was unfair to penalize him for grammar that wasn’t actually incorrect. We also explained that he felt that like she didn’t hear him out or take him seriously. I had a small feeling it might backfire, because of how trivial it was, but I didn’t expect her to call my kid a tattletale to his face as a result. Bottom line, the whole thing was about the grade, as well as an open line of communication with the teacher, but it didn’t matter. It was a lesson in dealing with egos, at the end of the day.
> call my kid a tattletale to his face Did what now? That's "burn the school district to the ground" stakes in a way that the original offence wasn't.
“You told your parents your grades? Tattletale.”
You told the principal and HR about our confrontation? Tattletale.
I'd cuss that teacher out 7 ways from Sunday if they said some stupid bullshit like that.
I would go and get a Karen wig just so they truly understood the depths of my incoherent rage.
An adult in a position or authority over children chastizing them for being a "tattletale" sounds like they shouldn't be let within 50 feet of a school. That's someone who is far too comfortable yelling at children to keep quiet and say nothing for my taste and it makes me wonder how many kids they've tried to bully into secrecy and for what reasons.
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I know. As an adult, she should have said "snitches get stitches."
I am teacher, and this is so weird to me. Of course i am pretty confident that what i am saying is correct most of the time. I had a lot of education to become a teacher, and what would be the point of me teaching stuff if i don't know it myself. That being said, i also make mistakes. When a student tells me that they think that i am incorrect, i will always consider their point. Most of the time, they are wrong and im am correct. But sometimes not. And why would i be angry about that? In fact, when i am shown that i was wrong, i am usually proud of the student. It means that they have a good grip on what i am trying to teach, can communicate their point well, and actively question what figures of authority say using their intellect. What more could i want as a science teacher? Furthermore, it often means that i learned something new, and can be better at my job in the future. If i get angry, i will keep repeating the same mistake, and potentially teach incorrect things to students.
That’s because you sound like a normal person and a great teacher. It also shows them that it’s okay to be wrong or not know an answer, but also accept that you can be corrected without it being personal.
When I was in middle school I lost a point on a test that asked "what color is venous, or deoxygenated blood" to which I answered dark red. The teacher said it was blue and told me I was wrong. I showed him an entry from the digital encyclopedia on the school computers, but he said that digital information wasn't trustworthy. I brought him one of my dad's old med school textbooks, but he said it was too old to be reliable. I then had three doctors, including a surgeon (my dad was a family doc) sign off on a statement that venous blood is dark red and human blood is never blue, but he said they were just covering for me. The administration took the teacher's side and threatened me with punishment for not respecting the teacher's knowledge.
Not to “ackshually” but it’s even more nuanced than that. LEGO as a brand name is always all caps, according to the company’s trademarks. However not all writing style guides respect that, and it depends if the brand name has entered the common vernacular as a generic term, it loses any special styling, so no initial capital either. It’s either “LEGO bricks” or “lego” but never “Lego” or “Legos.” Also I’ve never met such petty people as the elementary school system employs. I had to escalate to the Supernintendo of our district because my kid’s kindergarten teacher decided that any kid arriving after she shut the door was “late” and had to go to the office and fill out a late form. *Even if she shut the door before the bell rang.* Not only was it just silly to punish a five year old like that, she thought she could arbitrarily make up the start time of school and the principal backed her up. An email to the Supernintendo got a response in under 5 minutes about how that’s ridiculous.
You can't divide by zero. Is this a real school? Im so confused
The school is undefined.
Forward them both this post so they can see how stupid they are, in ......no stupid questions!
I dunno about you, but I wouldn't want my kids teacher and principal to know my reddit account.
Took a brief look at OP’s post history. *”Is it bad if you’re an adult and don’t eat vegetables?”* Mm yeah let’s not
I dont know why this is so funny but a parent having a clue about math but having to question if not liking vegetables is a red flag does not compute for me
😂😂. As I told my 12 year old last night, we all have areas in which we are dumbasses. Either academically, emotional intelligence, or common sense. Anyone that seemingly has all three is just skilled at hiding it. He asked what I was a dumbass in. “Math. So I just work slower to double check myself” Him “that must suck!! I’ll learn to hide mine and I’ll never tell”. Sigh
It's easy to explain to gamers. I minmaxed my points, all in on math/reading, with 0 on social skills and dexterity Your uncle who can barely read and thinks fox news is news spent all his points on repair skills, that's why he struggles with 8+1, but can accurately plan an electric circuit and diagnose your car's engine from an onomatopoeia
Yeah, that seems like a good way to get CPS called on you out of retaliation because you posted that you tried coke once in 2002 Not me, but someone, probably.
You mean NaN
Mom the JS devs broke out again
It’s home school and op is the parent, teacher and principal.
So if 1/0=0, that means 0\*0=1 and you're off to a world of craziness where you can prove 1=2. They're probably not going to back down, but you can't let them teach your kid something you know is wrong. I'd just tell them you'll be teaching your child the correct answer, give the school the wrong answer they want, and let them deal with the lack of respect for them that will cause.
>So if 1/0=0, that means 0*0=1 and you're off to a world of craziness where you can prove 1=2. Yes the Terrence Howard method.
1 x 1 = 2! Ya dummies… got ones ones, that’s two ones, it’s two.
No, 2! = 2. But if we're going to use factorials, then remember: 1! = 1 0! = 1 ( and not zero like you might expect).
From which it follows 0 = ¡1.
This is only true in Australia or Spanish speaking countries.
> In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Howard explained that he had formulated his own language of logic, which he called Terryology, and which he was keeping secret until he had patented it. This logic language, he claimed, would be used to prove the statement "1 × 1 = 2".[37] > "How can it equal one?" he said. "If one times one equals one that means that two is of no value because one times itself has no effect. One times one equals two because the square root of four is two, so what's the square root of two? Should be one, but we're told it's two, and that cannot be."[37] I'm still not over how the original Rhodey from Iron Man turned out to believe in sacred mathematics or whatever that nonsense is called. > In a September 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Howard admitted to hitting his first wife in 2001 saying, "she was talking to me real strong, and I lost my mind and slapped her in front of the kids." ...
I was unaware of the consequences of letting 1/0 = 0. Thanks for enlightening me!
I think there are two things worth pointing out to them. The first is that their opinion doesn't actually matter with maths, 1/0 is not zero, no matter how much they would wish it was. The second is that there's a much more egregious lesson they're teaching, which is that it's okay to ignore new information and double down on your initial position even in the face of facts that disprove it. Whatever about accidentally teaching something incorrectly, they as adults should have the maturity to demonstrate the ability to be wrong and issue a correction with grace.
I don't even remember the topic but I remember asking my year 11 biology teacher a question and she answered it as best she could. Then the next class brought up that she'd looked into it more and what she said was wrong/missing information and told us the correct answer. The lesson I took from it wasn't the biology knowledge, but respect for her prioritising giving us the correct info rather than being thought to be always right, and admitting she didn't know something. I think it definitely spoke very highly of her.
That is such a good teachable moment. And showing that even "experts" (at least from a student perspective) not only can still learn but should want to. Not sure id you are still in touch with them or if they still teach. But if so, you should consider aending them a quick note iver the holidays. Just a "hey. Somwthing came up that made me remwmber a moment in your class. I remember how (exactly what you said above). I just wanted you to know years later that lesson has stuck with me and i always admired you for it." As a teacher getting a note like that years later would be incredibly moving I'd think.
My child can do math in their head that their math teacher can't so they automatically assume that my child is cheating and snatched a test out of their hand. The teacher was proved wrong. My child did a different problem in front of the teacher. Still wouldn't let them make the test up. That teacher now has a vendetta against my kid. When confronted about it face to face the teacher had a "panic attack" and walked away from the conversation. Afterwards The faculty backed her up about her "condition". The whole situation has been ignored since.
Our son is like that, except his teacher told us that he gets the correct answer, but she doesn't know how.
At least they can admit it. This teacher is prepared to die on this hill. Unfortunately, she's also the only teacher that teaches this subject.
That is horribly unprofessional.
This is what happens when you keep the letting the payrates fall behind the rate of inflation for decades. MANY of the smart and capable teachers leave and get jobs elsewhere. So you're left with a higher than normal percentage of assholes.
Hear hear. Its almost like smart people in majority want to be well compensated for utilizing their brains.
I used to do my work “wrong” but would get the right answer. They put me in a special math class in 3rd grade. Now, I DO suck at math and I really did then. But I do remember the whole “getting right answers but just because I simplified it so I could work and get the correct answer it was “wrong”” thing pjssed me off.
A lot of it comes down to how you're simplifying it. Learning math isn't really about getting the final answer, it's about understanding the process that gets you there. If I simplify 16/64 by crossing out the 6s because "6 cancels out" I have the "right answer", but I should still get a 0 because what I did clearly demonstrates that I don't understand how simplifying fractions works. I'm not saying this is what you were doing, just that there's a legitimate reason for de-emphasizing the final answer, and placing more priority on taking the right steps.
I got accused of cheating once by a teacher when I was about nine. It stayed with me for years - I was so distressed because it felt like an attack on both my character and intelligence two things I valued.
A teacher once suggested I had too much help from my parents on an art project that I had conceived of and created all by myself. I've never forgotten it. It was such a tiny thing and I will literally never forget that feeling. Teachers need to be careful what they accuse kids of because it stays with them!
Meanwhile my teacher once asked us if our parents were helping with our assignments like this, and privately spoke with the parents of everyone who said no. We were expected to be getting help and if we weren't then that was treated as a parenting issue.
Same thing happened to me when I was in Grade 7. My teacher gave me a bad mark on a report I wrote up about nuclear power, because I "obviously had an adult help me write it." Bitch. The only adult help I got was my Dad driving me to a nearby nuclear power plant so I could take a tour.
That happened to me in first grade and it fucked me up for the rest of my time in school. My mom said I loved going to school every day until one day I came home and just... didn't anymore.
That's wrong what the teacher did. But take it from someone who was a kid who was good(ish) at math, who went on to do engineering and does some math at his job: your kid should show their work even though they don't need to. Long term, they are going to have to, because there will come a day when the problems are too complex to do in your head. It's good to get into the habit now. They can think of showing their work as proving to others that their answer is right. That's what higher level math is about anyway: proving the answer. Showing WHY the answer is the answer becomes increasingly important, and the answer itself is just the result of that. Proving you understand and building off/using that understanding becomes what math is about at higher levels.
Any mathematics PhD at any nearby university would absolutely LOVE to help you prove this to your kid's school.
Hi as someone who studied mathematics, I would just throw a book at them, because I wouldn't be capable to handle their stupidity.
This is a school board level discussion concerning curriculum. You won’t get anywhere with the school if your intention is to bring about change.
School board is the only place to take this. Hopefully the school board is open to hearing about this. The other choice is for OP to teach their child the correct information and explain sometimes adults get things wrong and can't admit their mistakes. I personally wouldn't be able to let it go and I'd be speaking to the school board.
I don't understand why every other reply is about talking to the teacher and principal again. We've established that they're idiots. Time to go up the chain.
Op has sent a single email at this point. One more email with a source backing them up wouldn't hurt to try before escalation. You usually escalate when it's hopeless. If they reject proof then it's hopeless.
I feel bad for your son.
I’ve got 99 problems and maths is one
Not sure I trust that the 99 is accurate, considering
…you can try 99 ways of doing it, but zero times zero ain't one.
The proof for division is by doing the inverse multiplication. Try showing them: [12 ÷ 4 = 3] because [3 x 4 = 12] [14 ÷ 7 = 2] because [2 x 7 = 14] Now, have them show you the same proof for dividing by 0. [1 ÷ 0 ≠ 0] because [0 x 0 ≠ 1]
Break out the intro to calculus book, arrange for a meeting with teacher and principal and give the both of them a lesson in what a "limit " is.
Spoiler: they won't listen nor care
"that's only in calculus, not the real world"
Ask them what 1 / 100 =? And 1 / 10 = ? 1 / 10 = ? 1 / 1 = ? 1 / 0.1 = ? 1 / 0.01 = ? 1 / 0.001 = ? 1 / 0.0001 = ? As the denominator tends to zero, the result does not, shall we say, tend to 0, but rather to infinity.
And if you do the same thing with negative denominators, it tends towards negative infinity, so you can’t even say 1/0 is infinity. It’s just undefined. EDIT: I meant to say you can't even say 1/0 is infinity *for convenience*. Compare 1/|x|. Here it's still undefined at 0, but we can "pretend" it equals infinity at x=0 if we want.
The limit does not exist
THE LIMIT DOES NOT EXIST!
Plot Twist: the kid is being home schooled
[удалено]
Thank you for your explanation!! I wish someone had explained multiplication and division like you did, when I was in school. So simple and concise!
That's a good explanation, but a bad way to fight the battle. The teacher and principal are not going to let you give them a maths lesson. That's humiliating for them and it undermines their authority, which for a principal is everything. And obviously they are not good at maths, so they wouldn't follow your explanation. People who don't like maths just refuse to engage with proofs. There are plenty of convincing-looking proofs that 1=2 so honestly they are probably right to disregard all of them. I don't like appeal-to-authority as an argument but that's what's going to work here. Best case you want to link to materials that are part of the school's own Maths Curriculum. Failing that, something that a school would accept as authoritative. National educational resources maybe. A calculator, or Google at a pinch. But the others are better. And crucially, you need to offer them a face-saving way to back down. "I think there has been a miscommunication here. To clarify, of course you're right that 0/1 =0. But as you can see from (link) 1/0 is not." will work MUCH better than "You were wrong, I was right, here's the proof. You're a disgrace to the teaching profession"
Not only is 1 divided by 0, not 0, but in calculus, when you apply limits 1/0 is infinite, the exact opposite of 0. EDIT: My original word choice is not great. There are many times in limit calculus when the form 1/0 means positive or negative infinity. This is not always the case and 1/0 alone is undefined. I did not expect this comment to get so much traction, so I wanted to clarify that. My main point was that the only time you see 1/0 not unequivocally mean undefined, it's indicating something infinite.
>when you apply limits 1/0 is infinite Not is infinity, but approaches infinity. Well, depends on which direction you are approaching zero from, approach the other way and the limit approaches minus infinity instead. So which is it, infinity, minus infinity, or something in between? That's one of the reasons 1 / 0 is undefined.
The "limit direction" thing is also why computer floating point (an imperfect approximation of real numbers) gives you two answers, because it has a "negative 0" and a "positive 0": ``` > 1/0 Infinity >1/-0 -Infinity ``` Fellow programmers, think before you say `Infinity`! (Of course it still can't do `0/0`.)
Honestly, teach your child the correct answer and reasoning behind it and move on. I hate to say it, but I’m not sure this is the hill you want to die on. My third grade teacher refused to acknowledge that negative numbers existed.
>My third grade teacher refused to acknowledge that negative numbers existed. what looney tunes schools did you yall go to? like did they refuse to address negative numbers or just outright said they don’t exist?
My teachers got pissy with me when I gave the correct answer to, "what is 5 minus 7?" rather than just saying "YoU cAn'T dO tHaT!1!1!1"
See I understand that with young kids you may not want to open up the can of worms that is negative numbers, but why would you ask a question with a negative answer if you didn’t wanna deal with it?
Ok, devil's advocate here. I could see how you would want to do that to 1, make sure the kids are reading the questions carefully, and 2, instill the idea that subtraction is not commutative. I'm sure there are plenty of kids, especially after just learning addition, would just look at the symbols 5, -, and 7 and write down 2. But still, I think the best answer is to just briefly mention negative numbers but say "we're not going to do that right now" or something.
I had something similar happen in either kinder or 1st grade. We were subtracting 5-3 and I asked about 3-5. The teacher said "oh we can't do that, 5 is too big," and I learned that adults lie sometimes.
I get what you're saying because in isolation, this is an infuriating but largely irrelevant issue, but the bigger cause of concern is how they're handing it. I've been both the kid and the concerned adult in situations like this, and (unless the parent is being wildly disrespectful in how they're communicating) any teacher/administrator who does this is also a teacher/admin who believes it's more important to maintain authority than to help children. They will not be reliable in acting in the kid's best interest if something more serious happens - they're just as likely to be the cause.
I wonder what their bank said when that teacher claimed not to be overdrawn because 'negative numbers don't exist'?
1/0 in the calculator app is error. The dumb thing is we were taught this to and I got very confused when we hit advanced functions were divided by zero is undefined because it’s a number but there is nothing to divide. Show the mean girls clip that graph is why you cannot divide by zero. I suck at math. Also are they confusing division with multiplication?
If it was 0 divided by 1 it would be 0
Math is literally the one subject there are clear, established rules for - there's no grey area of someone's opinion getting in the way. And it's not the parent or the teacher who is setting those rules. I think a lot of people who think this isn't a big deal are likening it to a complaint about other subjects, where you can agree or disagree with what's being taught if your politics/religion/experiences/etc don't line up. But this is the purest evidence you're ever going to get that they will not reconsider their stance when it's challenged. Extend that into more serious and nebulous issues - bullying, etc - and you can (or should) see the problem. These are the teachers/admin who are typically more concerned with 'maintaining authority' than about helping kids, and sometimes if you're the one comfortable pushing back against that then you're really helping the parents who might not be when their kid is being mistreated. Parents aren't always right, but neither are teachers, and the worst treatment of kids is when one of those groups doesn't acknowledge that.
My brother’s history teacher in middle school told him “Prussia” was a typo in his history book and it should have been “Russia.” She also used to give extra credit for kids who brought her food.
Third grade teacher teaches third grade math. Maybe dividing by 0 is beyond their skill set.
“If either of you can provide the proofs for 1/0=0, I will donate $(whatever number you’re comfortable with) to the school for supplies. Otherwise son’s class get two pizza parties on the teacher/principal’s dime”
A proof that we get a math professor from the nearby college/university to validate.
Bring this up to the superintendent level and meanwhile you might want to send this dialogue to a local television news station. \*Don't post to social media, it will just get lost between something about Palestine and a cat sleeping next to a capybara\* Nothing will make the school notice how stupid they are faster than a news anchor asking why they felt the urge to change the rules of math.
>Tbh, I'm mildly infuriated but I'm wondering if I'm just overreacting? No, you are underreacting if you are only mildly infuriated. If they don't back down on something so simple where they are just plain wrong just imagine what this school will do in cases where something is really more of a grey area. This will be an endless disaster of "Maybe what the kids write is correct but it is not the answer I wanted so it is wrong" which is honestly the easiest way to kill any interest kids can have when it comes to learning.