There's yet another somewhat viral math home problem making the rounds, where the student gave the most obvious and logical answer, only for the "correct" answer to be something completely incomprehensible that no sane human being can understand. The problem goes like:
"For every column of objects in an array there are 3 rows. The total number of objects in the array is 12. How many rows and columns does the array have?"
Ok, easy enough, an array with 12 objects in total, and 3 rows, so quite clearly it's a 3x4 array. In fact, the first part of the answer is given right in the question. So the answer should be "3 rows and 4 columns."
Nope, apparently the correct answer is "6 rows and 2 columns."
What?
"Columns" and "rows" quite unambiguously refer to a two-dimensional array. I literally can't twist my head to figure out how you get 6 rows from 3 rows.
The YouTube channel Wrath of Math, which very often makes videos precisely about these types of incomprehensible viral problems, made a video about it. Even after watching the video, and thus the explanation, I'm still completely confused. I just don't get it.
However, towards the end of the video he mentions something that actually "explains" it perfectly: Apparently this is an American "common core" math problem.
Ok, that doesn't explain the problem itself. However, it explains why it's completely asinine and incomprehensible to normal human beings, and why it's so utterly contrived and complicated. If you are a normal rational person, don't even bother trying to understand it. It's impossible to understand.
For a reason that absolutely nobody knows nor can understand, at some point the American schooling system decided to completely throw away the basic arithmetic methodology that has been successfully taught to primary school students for centuries, and replace it with a more "logical" and "easier" way... which in pretty much every single case is a thousand times more complicated and incomprehensible. If you are a normal person, you cannot understand it.
Astonishingly, these new "common core" methods are not taught in addition to the traditional methods. They have completely replaced the old methods. Addition, subtraction, multiplication... pretty much all of the ways in which arithmetic can be done with pen and paper, have been completely replaced with absolutely insane incomprehensible gibberish. And not only are the methods insane, but the entire thing is littered with absolutely incomprehensible and insane terminology that nobody can understand either.
On top of that, not only are these new "common core" methods a thousand times more complicated than the old ones, they also don't scale to larger numbers at all. For example the way in which they teach to multiply two numbers is not only more complicated, confusing, much slower and harder to understand, but it doesn't scale up to larger numbers at all. It might be able to multiply two two-digit numbers, but that's it. Anything larger, and it becomes either prohibitively complicated, or outright impossible.
Meanwhile the simpler way of the good old long multiplication method, which can be easily used to multiply numbers of any size, is not taught at all.
Why?
Nobody knows.
The entire "common core" maths needs to die a painful death and burn in hell, to be forgotten forever and never to return. No wonder the vast majority of Americans are so stupid and can't do nor understand even the most basic of things.
There's a famous hilarious video of some teacher explaining how to multiply 35 times 12 using the "common core" method, while a guy calculates it using long multiplication in 15 seconds and then proceeds to prepare coffee, all the while the teacher is still not done.
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