Posted on 10/19/2020 12:41:17 PM PDT by where's_the_Outrage?
My 1st grader's homework had a problem about the number of sides on a circle. I have a BS in Math and never thought about it, my initial thought was 1. Turns out there are multiple correct answers:
2 sides: Outside and inside
1 side: There is only one line
0 sides: A circle has no sides.
∞ (infinite) sides: Each point in a circle would be a separate side (yes, way too egghead for 1st grade)
The correct answer is always Marxist revolution.
You’re right. The issue isn’t how many sides on a circle, the issue is...
Now apologize to where’s_the_Outrage? for thread-jacking.
You first have to define what you mean by side.
Starting awful early on that ‘2+2=5 depending on how you define all the factors’ crap.
I think infinite is correct, but for a first grader, none.
The other answer you suggest are fun but I think are more word game and not relevant to teaching math.
It seems equivalent to “How may faces does a sphere have?”
The reason behind this question is to teach/indoctrinate kids at a very early age that there is no right or wrong answers, that everything is relative. That is the basis of the leftist ideology.
That’s deep
Only the left side (/SJW teacher answer).
I think I had a class on Cantor. I remember having to prove equivalence between Whole, natural, Integers and rational numbers under the assumption infinity is infinity. However that did not expand to real, irrational and imaginary numbers.
ID, OD, top and bottom.
I did very well on these sorts of questions in grade school. One reason was, when the question was ambiguous, I tried to think like the teacher.
I don’t know this 1st grade teacher, but if I had to guess, I’d say s/he would be expecting the answer “1 side”. If it were a smart aleck 8th grade math teacher, I’d go for “2 sides”. If it were a pedantic, blockhead 11th grade teacher, I’d go for “no sides”.
I had already emailed her teacher saying: “The correct answer would have to be based on the explicit definition of a side.”
Geometry is a racist construct.
How many sides does our moon have. I’ve seen only one, but I guess that’s relative to your position in relation to the moon. So, since there are an infinite number of positions one could view the moon from, there are an infinite number of sides to the moon.
Everyone is thinking of the circle and how it would appear if drawn on a sheet of paper. You need to think three dimentionally and view the circle from the “side” so that it would appear to you as a line of fixed length. Now rotate your viewing position around the center of the circle on the same plain as the circle and there you go. An infinite number of sides.
The full question (and there had been previous just like it) was Sides___ and Corners ______
The polygons all had the sides and corners being equal, so her correct answer is most likely zero.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.