The teacher’s meaning is clear, which is the purpose of language. Mickey’s just being a grammar nazi.
Both sides are being unbearably obstinate here.
The teacher’s meaning is clear and the kid should just answer what is being asked, not what is being said. So the kid is in the wrong. If you’re smart enough to be this clever, just answer the question.
The teacher says “You are wrong, failed” when the kid is technically correct, instead of clarifying the intent of the question. So the teacher is in the wrong. “Clever, but you know what I meant” solves the problem. “You get an A in math and an F in interpreting language”
On the flip side, I had a cousin who had a question on a test: “What is the largest SI prefix” … he answered “yotta” (which at the time was the largest)… And got it wrong. because the “correct” answer was “mega”. Because that was the largest the class had learned about at the time, and the teacher was very inflexible on this; they acknowledged that yotta was the largest, but my cousin had learned about it outside of class, so it couldn’t be an acceptable answer. The teacher couldn’t possibly fathom marking “mega” right for students who had only context from the classroom and also marking “yotta” right for students who had done independent research. No, the question was IMPLIED to be “what is the largest SI prefix [that we have covered in class]” and anything else was wrong.
The teacher couldn’t possibly fathom marking “mega” right for students who had only context from the classroom and also marking “yotta” right for students who had done independent research.
That is child abuse. Literally. The way my teachers worked, presumably because they learned how to deal with the situation when actually studying pedagogics (a thing we require of teachers here) is to give an extra point because you want to encourage kids to figure things out on their own.
Actually we don’t know whether 2+3 equals to 3+2 without seeing the definition of the + operator
Fun fact: C doesn’t even guarantee
a + b == a + b*If a and b are
floatOr signed integers because overflow is undefined. It could do the left-hand computation in two’s complement and the right hand in sign-magnitude, leading to different results. Or, as it’s undefined, it could brew you some coffee and serve it with an aspirin.
That’s decidedly unfun and headhurty for those of us less mathemstically inclined. Also so deep into the theoretical weeds that I’m not sure that “fact” applies…
One night I dreamt about the new C standard. It was a tome of ten thousand pages, in dense, tiny, font, three columns of text on each page, and it was all headings and sub-headings interspersed with nothing but either “undefined” or “implementation-defined”.
If
1 x 0 = 0
And
2 x 0 = 0
Then 1 = 2.
And this folks is why you don’t hire “math teachers” because he was a successful football coach. It took him way too long to realize this is why we don’t divide by zero, (more than a week, actually.)
