Answering this CE1 level mathematics homework is not an easy task. On the internet, hundreds of parents are stuck on the wording of the exercise, which makes it complicated to understand.
All parents hope that their children will succeed at school, but not only with the aim of future professional success: it is also in the hope that they will not need help with their homework! Because let’s face it, when the last lessons date back 20 or even 30 years, it’s not easy to lend a hand… Unless you have become a mathematician or a teacher, adults have kept little memory of the rules of mental arithmetic or how to perform division, for example. And when the time comes to help your own children with their homework, you can quickly realize that our level is no better than that of a CE1 student! It’s not for nothing that math is the subject that stresses parents the most at home.
This is what many parents are talking about on the international Reddit forum, where a math problem designed for 7-year-olds has caused a lot of ink to flow. A mother shared the photo of the statement, expressing her amazement at the difficulty of the exercise and above all, the complexity of its wording. And it is clear that in the comments, Internet users are unanimous: they themselves are incapable of understanding it, and even less of solving it. “My brain shut down before I could finish reading it”, “I can reread it as many times as I want, I still don’t understand anything”, “The idea is good, but the wording is catastrophic”can we read among the approximately 600 incredulous comments. The observation is the same for everyone: “I wouldn’t go to second grade today.” And honestly, neither do we.
The math problem in question is titled “Use your logic”the aim being above all to encourage reflection rather than algebra itself. Here is the statement: “Brian has boxes of paper clips. Some boxes have 10 paper clips and some have 100. He has paper clips left (in bulk). He has three more boxes of 100 paper clips than boxes of 10 paper clips. He has two fewer paper clips than boxes of 100 paper clips. How many paper clips can he have?” The problem is indeed thorny, especially since there are several possible answers: it can be 412, but also 523 or even 967. The goal is to work by hundreds, by dozens, then by units. “The number of hundreds is three more than the number of tens, and the number of ones is two less than the number of hundreds. So any number that matches that is fine.”explains one Internet user in particular.
So, “if the tens column is 1, then the hundreds column is 4 and the ones column is 2, which gives 412”. So the answer could also be 301, or 634, or 745, or 856 for example: because if Brian has five boxes of 10 paper clips, he therefore has eight boxes of 100 paper clips (5+3) and six paper clips (8-2) remaining in bulk. As is often the case in math, once the method is integrated, things happen on their own. No need for a calculator or complex formula to remember: just take a random digit for the tens, then do an addition (+3) to obtain the hundreds digit, and a subtraction (-2) to obtain the ones digit.
But all the difficulty lies in the statement. “My students would not understand anything, the wording is not adapted to a CE1 level. The calculation itself is doable at this age, but it is almost impossible for them to understand on their own. To successfully dissect the problem, it is more of a cycle 3 level, that is to say CM2 students or more“confirms Roxane, teacher of a CE1 class in the Paris region. And you, did you understand at first glance?
