Are you ever scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or an equivalent social media platform and come across a post of an elementary math problem asking you to solve it? The post often provides viewers with an example of a problem with an answer found using basic order of operations and even sometimes give multiple choices for what the solution could be. When you work through it and are confident in your answer, you head to the comments to check to see if you are right. You find, though, to your dismay, that the responses are flooded with differing answers and agitated social media users. They note, “The result is infinite,” “12?,” “2,” “64,” “Both B and C are valid answers,” “to bad ur wrong,” “Isn’t it 1 no matter what you do” and even, “Why can’t anyone ever answer these math questions without a debate? Our education system is a FAILURE.”
Not only do these responses make you question your knowledge
and retention of information from your math education, but they also might make
you question the education system as a whole. Why are so many people getting
these problems wrong and how can we actually solve these equations?
For problems containing information such as those on these
controversial posts, the solution is most commonly found using order of
operations. This is frequently referred to as PEMDAS, an acronym for
parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction.
These identify that the equation should be solved in this order, beginning with
solving whatever operation comes first in PEMDAS before continuing to what
comes next. With the pairs of multiplication and division, addition and
subtraction, solutions are found by solving left to right. According to the
South Dakota State Standards for Mathematics, this information is taught at the
3rd-grade level and is a foundational step to learning mathematics. Remove
this mathematical knowledge foundation and tell people that an answer they felt
to be almost certainly true is wrong, and disagreements emerge.
What really, then, are the right answers to these equations?
Well, as stated by Tara Haelle in her article “What Is the Answer to
That Stupid Math Problem on Facebook,” “while the math itself lacks ambiguity…
math has syntax just has language does – with the same potential for
ambiguities.” Therefore, there are different ways to think about these
problems, and while PEMDAS may seem like mathematical common law and a
universal truth, it is more of a conventional way of solving equations to
arrive at common answers.
In conclusion, though math equations on social media may
divide audiences, causing those in comments to argue over what may be the
“right” answer, these may not be the most beneficial discussions. Shouldn’t we
be open to looking at various logical answers, rather than shutting down different
ways of thinking? Personally, as a future math educator, I want to encourage
students to think critically about problems they come across and explore possible
alternate routes to solutions. Therefore, our goal for these problems doesn’t
always have to be to find the right answer, but rather, to learn to use
mathematics to express thoughts and reasoning in rational ways.
Links to articles mentioned:
https://doe.sd.gov/contentstandards/documents/0521-Math-Standards.pdf
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