Mom Spots Something Strange in Math Homework Given to 8-Year-Old Daughter

A mom was left puzzled after spotting something unusual about her 8-year-old daughter’s math homework.

The importance of homework has been the subject of debate for some time now, with many arguing that the benefits of this additional work were outweighed by the impact on overall well-being.

A 2013 study published in the Journal of Experimental Education saw 4,317 students from 10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities complete a survey on their experience of homework. These students completed an average of around 3.1 hours of homework each night, and while this additional workload was having a positive effect on academic performance, it was proving significantly detrimental outside of it.

According to the survey, 56 percent of students viewed homework as a primary source of stress, and many cited their homework load as leading to sleep deprivation and other health problems. Many of the students polled also admitted they had less time for friends, family and extracurricular activities as a result of their homework.

The message was clear: the negatives of spending large chunks of time on homework far outweighed the positives. But sometimes kids can end up stuck on a particular homework assignment for altogether more unusual reasons.

That was the case for one 8-year-old and her mom, who was left scratching her head after looking over her daughter’s math homework.

In a post shared to Reddit under the handle u/kate_seddy, the mom, who asked to be simply referred to as Kate, shared the confusing conundrum her child had been presented with.

Ostensibly an Easter-themed math challenge, the girl had been tasked with coloring in a picture of a bunny and carrot using a sum-based key. Each section had to be filled in a certain color based on the simple sum within it. For example, any sum with the answer of 15 had to be colored in pink.

There was just one problem, though. One section, inside the bunny’s ear, which should have been pink, contained a sum with an answer that most definitely wasn’t 15. It was 20, meaning the section needed to be colored yellow despite the jarring effect on the picture.

“I first noticed it when going through the work she brings home from school daily,” Kate told Newsweek. “I noticed the missed color right away, and I thought maybe she’d gotten the equation wrong until I looked closer at the equation and coordinated color in the key.”

Kate initially brushed it off as an “innocent mistake” by whoever put the worksheet together. However, having shared it on the internet, she soon found others positing an altogether different theory.

“I’ve since learned from the comments on Reddit that it’s a technique to see which kids are actually doing the math, and which are just coloring where they know the colors go,” she said. “That makes perfect sense to me now, but the perfectionist in me still finds the image annoying with the wrong ear color.”

Valid theory or not, Kate has been surprised at how much attention the worksheet has gotten since she posted it to Reddit, where it has received 25,000 upvotes and counting.

“I’m not really sure why a simple child’s worksheet got so much attention,” she said. “It did bring up a lot of discussion about the technique of checking who is paying attention and who isn’t. It also seemed to hold some nostalgia from people who remember doing the same type of worksheets in school.”

Whatever the truth might be, she’s not planning on bringing it up with her daughter’s teacher.

“I haven’t talked to the school or her teacher; it was just something I found amusing, and I didn’t see a need to bother them with it,” she said.

In any case, she’s impressed that her young daughter noticed the mistake.

“She said she saw it and thought, ‘Why did they make it yellow instead of pink? That makes no sense.’ She said even though she noticed it, she thought it was important to do the correct math work.”

This isn’t the first time a spot of homework has left people scratching their heads.

A first-grade child’s English homework left both her parents and the internet completely baffled back in November. Another fifth grader’s math homework, meanwhile, had people similarly stumped. Then there was the unsolvable math problem found stapled to a tree in Finland.