TEXAS — A first grade mathematics problem has sparked confusion and frustration, as some parents and online users struggled to accept its supposed solution.

Ms Tiesha Sanders, a mother from Texas in the United States, took to her Facebook account on Feb 3 to share a perplexing homework assignment from her daughter's first grade maths class.

Students in the first year of elementary school in the US are typically between six and seven years of age.

For the maths problem, students were instructed to “fill in the missing numbers”. They were presented with the number “27” and asked to fill out a table to reflect the quantity of "tens" and "ones" in that number. 

Ms Sanders’ daughter Summer wrote “2" in the tens column and “7” in the ones column.

The last part of the question then prompted her to specify the number of ones, so she repeated her earlier answer of “7”.

However, this was incorrect, Summer’s teacher said in her grading. Confused as to why this was the case, Ms Sanders returned the worksheet to the teacher with a note.

“Hello, I just wanted to ask how Summer got #3 wrong? Her father and I were going over her mistakes and wanted to be sure we were on the right track,” Ms Sanders wrote below the maths question.

Explaining that the correct answer was actually “27 ones”, Summer’s teacher wrote back: “Hello, this is the new maths they have us teaching. It wants her to know that having 2 tens and 7 ones is the same as 27 ones.”

DIFFICULT TO ACCEPT 'NEW' TEACHING

Frustrated by the response, Ms Sanders wrote on Facebook: “The new maths is not it!”

Ms Sanders goes on to clarify that she is not upset with the teacher as she is “just teaching what she’s supposed to”. However, as an educator who has taught in elementary school for the past six years herself, Ms Sanders found the right answer difficult to accept.

And the Texan mum was not the only one. Ms Sanders’ Facebook post has since gone viral, attracting more than 4,800 comments and 19,000 shares as of Monday, with many online users scratching their heads over the maths question.

One Facebook user wrote: “Umm, maybe I’m not too smart because I’m with Summer.” 

Another person said: “I major in maths and I never in my life heard of anything like 27 ones.”

Many people took issue with the way the maths problem was presented, calling it “unclear” and “ambiguous”.

One pointed out: “It should have been stated 2 tens and 7 ones = _____ ones because the equal sign would have given a clue that they were asking for a total number.”

Another comment read: “I get what the teacher is saying, but the parent or the child aren’t wrong either. It’s the directions that are misleading.”

A number of educators also chimed in with their thoughts on “new math”.

One teacher wrote: “I hate teaching it! (I’ll) be just as confused as the parents.”

Another opined: “I taught maths. I lead the maths department as an assistant principal. Eureka maths is tough on us who didn’t learn it that way. The student will use the language all the way to fifth grade.”

On the Math4Children website, it is stated that Eureka mathematics is a comprehensive maths curriculum that emphasises conceptual understanding, problem-solving and mathematical reasoning.  

It was developed by the non-profit organisation Great Minds in 2013 and was reported to be the most widely used maths curriculum in America in 2017.

However, the programme has been criticised by parents, teachers and school administrators for being too demanding for younger students, Louisiana-based news website The Times-Picayune reported.

Closer to home in Singapore, online users were similarly stumped by a Primary 3 maths question in May last year. 

A heated discussion was ignited on online forum Reddit after a user posted about a problem sum on multiplication from her nephew’s workbook. Although the nephew’s method of calculation appeared to be correct and yielded the right answer, his teacher had marked it wrong.

Reddit users weighed in with different theories on why this could be so.