[concerned about politics]

Maybe he didn't "feel" the right way about the numbers. Did he "feel" sorry for the number 1 because it was smaller than number 3?
Did he think 3 should "share" one of it's numbers with the 1 to make it fair?
How did he "feel" about the number 5? Was it too oppressive to the poorer number 2?
If his "feelings" were politically incorrect, he may have failed had you not snapped the teacher back to reality.

[Grampa Dave]

My older son's approach to math is logical and not PC. So he had no feelings about numbers and their outcome in mathematical problems/equations. His concern was doing the math correctly and getting the correct answers.

Your comments are very interesting. Our older son was 2 classes ahead of his younger brother. For the most part he was exposed and taught real math. His younger brother was exposed to the bs that you joke about in your reply.

We did not realize what was happening to our younger son. By the time we realized, he was in hs, hated math and did terrible if he had a real math teacher. He had to learn math the hard way in reality when he was graduated from high school. He is now good in basic math, but there is no thanks to the touchy feeling stuff that he got in Marin county and obviously later in Sacramento during his first 4-5 years of school. By then the damage had been done to him!