Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Quite a little number

Mixed and mixed-up

My computational math students have some problems with mixed numbers. I'm talking about numbers like four and two-thirds or five and one-seventh. I recently gave a quiz where students were asked to multiply these particular two mixed numbers together. The result is supposed to be 24. Not everyone got that answer. One student, completely stumped, resorted to desperate diversionary tactics:

Sorry, kid. I annotated his answer in red ink: “Strangely enough, this is not the correct answer.”

Math is hard.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

all you need is love.

Anonymous said...

I should try this one next time, since I'll probably fail my line integrals test anyway. Math is hard.

Vyaas said...

Haha...innocence knows know bounds.