Kids are different today

This is my drawing of an actual task that was in our daughter's math book (see the part a). Granted, it was an extra task, but it was heavily emphasised to do those too. All this during the first season of the first grade at school. Can you believe it?

Even knowing what the hell this task is all about took some thinking from my part. The goal is to find three numbers of which sums of two equal the number outside the triangle. Sorry, can't make it this better in English! Maybe that's why there was no explanation in Finnish either, LOL!


I'm not totally convinced what is the point of this kind of tasks. Basically it's just guessing. You can't expect any 7-year-old child to create an algorithm which would solve all these triangle tasks like I did (see the part b). And there was a lot of these triangles in her math book.

I tried my best to visualize her the idea of the task by constructing a triangle and moving chrome balls inside it. It wasn't easy, but somehow she understood my point. Yes, I'm no teacher but anyway. It was satisfying to see her done a good job in a math test. There was one triangle task in it as well, which was a bit surprising. Extra tasks shouldn't be there at all.

My own memories from 1973 are somewhat indeterminate. All I remember is that there were some balls and squares inside circles. We were drawing unions and intersections there. I can hardly think of myself solving the same triangle tasks our daughter had last Fall. Then again I had no-one to help me but still. I wasn't interested in learning those days anyway. The kids today are much wiser than we used to be. That is somehow comforting.