Millie's Maths Muddle 

This is my biggest pet peeve. As a tutor at my college I've seen students reduced to tears over math and I have to explain that they're doing everything right and actually have a pretty good understanding of the math, but the questions are just worded poorly. schools pose these useless and vague questions as if trying to prove that math is hard. Students of all ages can get it f you don't just set them up for failure and instead actually try to teach the concepts. To anyone out there struggling, you're probably not as bad at math as you might think, keep trying.

*Lights cigarette and stands on the balcony, overlooking the garden below* "Today, I will reduce my patio by exactly 36%"

My sister has a math teacher who used this video and said “If you ever find a question on any test I give you that isn’t straight to the point and uses clear and concise wording, please let me know... because I never want to put you through this kind of stuff”

"It seems more like it's trying to trip people up, as opposed to trying to test if they understand something" - welcome to the American education system

garden in middle, dimension stay at 10 by 23, no math required

who would win an entire community of people from different backgrounds or One confusing mathy boi

Im like, 99% sure the whole class is going to complain about this question and the teacher will drop it from the grading process.

Based on my experience with these questions and the teachers who give them, Millie’s teacher will only except one of the correct answers as the true correct answer and everyone but one student will get it wrong. That student was either extremely lucky or the teacher’s pet.

Only in the RT community can you get people trying to solve a math question from a middle schooler's homework just for the hell of it.

This is probably why I was so discouraged by math in High School. I never seemed to have an issue with math right until I reached high school and had questions that were confusing me. I'd do them properly but wouldn't "answer the question correctly". And if I asked for help from the teacher the response was to meet her after school if I wanted help as if I as a teenaged boy wanted to spend more time at school vs. playing sports or games. The teacher never explained the questions to me in class and tried to help me so I just gave up on math altogether and decided I wasn't going to go into a math intensive career. Seeing videos like this upsets me because it's explained so easily and makes math not seem as difficult as it felt for me in high school. Channels like this are excellent and I'm glad there are people out there like Bottled Experience that take the time to explain it properly and in an easily digestible way.

it's insane to imagine this question was written so poorly for someone as young as millie. i've seen less stressful/confusing math questions written by college board, who try to trip you up as much as possible, in my AP calculus class. kudos for explaining this!

I had a math teacher for half of high school, AP algebra I and AP geometry, that was very deliberate in making sure questions were worded well and not vaguely, so glad to see I haven't just lost my math skills, I was just blessed with a very good teacher.

I didn't even consider the garden going around the patio since it wasn't explicitly mentioned. So acceptable answers should be 6.4 x 23ft or 10 x 14.72ft. since the former is a cleaner answer, that's the one I would write. Ain't nobody measuring out 14.72 of their patio.

See, I knew I had an issue with this problem, because it felt like I should understand the concepts behind it (I was an Algebra and Calculus tutor in high school ffs) but I just could not wrap my head around what they question was actually asking.

I just multiplied the whole thing by four to turn it into a percentage, then quartered it at the end. Also, that type of question is standardised testing in a nutshell.

I now understand how my parents felt with math questions, only 10 years ago I was in middle school, and I was soooo incredibly confused.

Seems to me, based off of how the question was phrased, all one really needs to do is reduce one side by 9/25 or 36%. Which is pretty easy to do if one side is 10. My final answer; 23*6.4.

When this Off Topic came out I was in highschool. I wrote the problem down and brought it to a few teachers. Everyone said it was BS and way too advanced for 7th grade math. Same thing you said, it's not really specific enough. I spent an afternoon on this thing as a highschool senior who is now a Business Major. I pissed off half of the math department with this problem

I really wish someone would just point out to this instructor the impracticality of using 9/25 in any sort of construction aspect. It cant be reduced at all to a measurement actually used in trades (1/2 , 1/4 , 1/8 , 1/16 , not commonly used 1/32) so using 9/25 would throw standard fitting allowances (1/8") out of wack meaning there would be far more measurements to figure out to keep anything structurally sound. The question is honestly flawed from the get go.

If you wanted to be smarmy, you could do... Area = 10ft x 23ft = 230sqft Area b of new patio = 1 - 9/25 = 16/25 so Area b = (230sqft ÷ 25) x 16 = 147.2sqft 147.2/π = 46.855 √46.855 = 6.845 6.845 x 2 = 13.69 Therefore, the dimensions of Gregory's newly reduced patio, are that it is a circle of diameter 13.69ft. Which as a way of creating space for your garden is nearly as pointless as the original question.

I remember questions like these, i simply just wrote out a correct answer, and then something like "this is one set of dimensions you could have, but your question is worded horribly and is ambiguous as to what you are wanting for the shape, therefore i have decided on a shape for you and given those dimensions, if you want a proper question, tell us how we are meant to shape this sort of an object" Questions like these never have actually seeing if the child is learning in mind, it's just some person who thinks they are smart coming up with questions

This is why I will always despise story problems. It almost always in my head get abstract because things aren't explicit. Having a crappy explanation didn't help either. So glad I stopped at pre-cal.

You know, I wanted to make the green patch into a circle that had a radius of ~5.134~ but then I realized that if would make a diameter of 10.268 which is larger than one side of the patio so it wouldn't work. Plus I"m too lazy to try and figure out other shapes. All I know is this is one of those problems that is just poorly asked so it breaks down teaching math theory. Plus in real life, barring home associations, you would just measure out whatever portion of the patio you want, take those dimensions, add a bit more for safety, and then go get the sod/soil/plants from a home improvement/gardening store.

Really glad I found this out of the blue. On one hand, I never gave the math question a second thought as I knew I wouldnt be able to solve it without dedicating some time to, but on the other hand, the itch of finally having this math question solved gets weight off my shoulders.

THIS IS WHAT I THOUGHT TOO. WHAT UNINTELLIGENT NUGGET WROTE THE PROBLEM LIKE THIS

New Area = LW(1-9/25) = 16/25LW = (4/5L)(4/5W). The wording is weird but the algebra is actually very straight forward.

Wauw...yeah, thinking back to high school math, this is exactly what happens. Poorly chosen words for a relatively easy problem. I always found I was applying two sets of skills, one being linguistics, to solve any math problem. I once had a test that counted heavily to our final score, and I got stuck on the first question. Being invested as I was, i lost track of time and solved only this problem, out of the 6 presented. I was distressed when the bell rung and I had t hand in my work. I explained my problem, and admitted that I should have looked at the other problems first before trying to solve the first, and not stay stuck on it. I was certain to fail, but a few weeks later we received our grades. I scored 60%, even if I just finished one question. I never understood why, besides for me having solved one question in 4 different ways. Turns out that the teacher wanted only one of the answers and was impressed that I got every single one of them, for every way you could sling the words and did them all correctly. And she took me aside to ask me if I was interested in taking advanced classes, because I was using formula's not yet mentioned in our current classes. I Declined and don't use advanced math in my life any way. But I took the compliment!! ...and the passing grade. I was just happy to pass.

I have a mathematics learning disability (Dyscalculia), and I suffered so badly through school. All of the questions were like this, with only a few being fairly worded, and it frustrated me to tears (and eventually, led me to develop depression by the age of 11, as I had straight As in all my other classes but always failed math, so all the teachers thought I just wasn't trying, when in reality some parts of my brain legitimately do not function). To this day, I am severely math illiterate, to the point that my ability to manage basic numbers is extremely poor, and I have very low self esteem as a result. Videos like this are reassuring to me, because maybe it wasn't all my fault, and the questions being phrased this way and the way math is taught in school is likely in part to blame for my difficulties both as a kid and as an adult. Thank you so much for explaining this.

i love the fact that you actually went to the trouble of solving the problem and everything

Math has always killed me in word problems. I have anxiety and math class would ruin me because I'd hyper focus on what the question actually wanted instead of just doing math.

I don't know why this would have been that hard of a problem; I recently tutored for grade 7 level geometry, and when they learn about scaling shapes, they learn that scaling the lengths of the sides is proportional to scaling the area by the square of that amount. In this case, we go backwards: each side is scaled by sqrt(9/25)=3/5. I.e., the new dimensions are 0.6*10 and 0.6*23. You don't even need to know the actual area.

I like that somehow there's an explanation video needed for this maths problem.

This is an AWFUL math question. The answer is left so deliberately vague that I have no idea how the teacher was expecting the entire class to come up with a single gradable answer. It just asks for the new "dimensions" of the patio. You can find 230 square feet just fine, find 9/25s of that number just fine, and subtract that number from the total just fine... BUT THEN WHAT? The correct answer, as the question was worded, could be ANY valid set of "dimensions" that will square up to 147.2 square feet. All POSSIBLE dimensions should be valid answers. I doubt the teacher will take the time to take all those dimensions and find out if they're valid or not, but they all could be. This feels a lot like a teacher copy-pasted a multiple choice question from a premade test and then decided to make it open answer instead. Questions like these make me glad that more colleges are going to computer based exams that allow students to flag questions if they feel they are vague or poorly phrased. Teachers aren't infallible. I've known plenty of great teachers who couldn't write a decent test question to save their lives (or their students grades).

Why are people working out the area, just keep one length the same (say the 10). Take the fraction 9/25 which your getting rid of, meaning you keep 16/25. Take the length value of 23 and times by 16/25 = 14.72 You new dimension are 10 by 14.72 No need to try over complicate it, give the simplest answer

This is absolutely a STARR based question. From a teacher here the STARR is the worst thing to happen to Texas Education in a long time. It’s all reading tests. Not a math, social studies, or science test. A reading test.

Perfect video. Good on you for making this.

I love whoever this was explained by So i send you My Gratitude

the way I interoperated it is that you have to reduce the size by 9/25 meaning 32%. So I took the length 10ft and multiplied it by .68 (because that would get you 68% or what would remain if you took off 32%) to get 6.8ft and then the width 23 multiplied by .68 to get 15.64ft. so the new dimensions would be 6.8ft by 15.64ft.

Stumbling upon this randomly, years after first hearing the problem, i’m glad someone else had the same opinion of the problem and made the same assumptions when solving it. In my case however I constructed a system of equations because i find them more intuitive and when watching your solution i found it hard to justify how I knew you’d need to take the square root of the scale factor, which I’d undoubtedly need to explain to someone struggling with the problem who saw this solution. Great video however, very well done..

I took an assumption on what was meant for this, but I don’t remember it anymore. Hearing you explain the issues with it, though, was definitely an eyeopener, as well as a repeated reminder of how shiteballed the education system is.

This was better done than any of the actual RT crew, but you still make it more difficult than it needs to be. "Reduce by" *always* means to remove that much from. "Reduce to" could mean leave 9/25, but you will never get the right answer by, as Jack did, (9/25)*230 if they ask you to reduce by 9/25. That said, the only real ambiguity here is, as you said, the dimensions required. While all those answers could be correct, under the criteria given, I think it is clear that Gregory will want some sort of regular polygon, at least, probably a rectangle. Beyond that, I would have just given some form of rectangular dimensions such as saying 147.2 square feet, about 21x7, or given proper significant figures if the teacher asked. I would not have considered that the teacher wanted a proportional ratio of the original rectangle like you said. That said, it does make sense and fit well. If that is really the only acceptable answer, according to the teacher, then I would object/argue the grade if I could show my answer was still correct as worded. Also, the whole square root thing at the end was unnecessary. Just show there are 4 left out of 5 in each direction. that is a ration of 8/10. Multiply each original dimension by 0.8. To me, at least, that is easier than showing the ratio of 16/25, giving the square root of each then multiplying.

This feels like it was written like a Jim Crow era literacy test at polling places.

My high school geometry teacher did problems like this and it was so damned frustrating. And it wasn't as though I was the only one struggling, either. Something like 80% of our Geometry class was at like a flat C or lower, and the teacher vocally blamed us for not understanding her teaching method properly.

My guess is that you are supposed to notice that 9/25 = (3/5)^2 and take a 6 by 13.8 chunk out of one of the corners

If you reduce the area of the patio by 9/25, you imply that you are keeping 16/25ths of the area and turning that 9/25ths into grass. The overall area is 230 ft^2, so multiply that by 16/25 to get the new area of 147.2 ft^2. Because the initial area shaping is a rectangle (10*23ft), you would keep the rectangle shape. Divide 147.2 by 10 (keeping the base length) to get a depth into the yard of 14.72ft The final answer for this problem should be 10ft by 14.72ft in a rectangular shape.

I had a question once in high school that was quite similar in concept, but the owner of the garden wanted a pathway around the garden. Was hard as hell to figure out how to do it tho XD

Great video!

See the funny thing about this is at least up here in canada land, you don't learn about squares and square roots till grade 9.

so i could be wrong from my understanding of question not providing an idea / hint of what the new dimensions should look like the number of solutions is infinite. so i thought about would the area equation would look like as a graph, so took the equation N=Y*X or rearranged as Y=N/X where X and Y are the dimensions and N is the new area of the garden. using the math that has been done to find the new area the equation for this question would be Y=147.2/X . this produces a graph where X and Y could be any number larger than 0 (or any number smaller than 0 so X and Y are negative)

questions like these are what make people go crazy trying to do math. and causes them to HATE IT!

i shared this problem with both my old ap calc teacher from high school and my aunt who tutors in math at college and both of them hate this question

Given one of her other questions involved dilating/scaling, i suspect the class was currently going over (whatever that topic name is). THe problem here is that the context may not be obvious to us not in the class, but it wouldve been had they read the whole things or asked Millie what she learned about approaching this problem. there are many ways to solve any problem, just as youve mentioned, but theres no reason a student would need it explicitely written out in each question.

Keep it at 10 ft x 23 ft and cut a circular hole in the middle with a radius of 5.13ft Total area: 10 x 23 = 230ft 9/25ths area (amount to be reduced by/removed): 230 x 9 / 25 = 82.8ft Radius of hole to cut: 82.8ft = pi x (radius squared); radius = square root of (82.8 / pi) = 5.13ft Play stupid games, win stupid prizes; ask stupid questions, get stupid answers

When a college math major gets tripped up on a 7th grade word problem due to the wording of the problem, you know something’s fucked up.

Dude 7th grade is so different now.. I was learning double and triple digit multiplication and Division... But tbh I was paying much attention.

no wonder I was so confused during math.

Everyone is thinking about this wrong. If you listen to the other questions, they've obviously been learning about scaling shapes. If you want to reduce the patio to 16/25 of its area you multiply both dimensions by the square root of 16/25, which is 4/5. This gives you final dimensions of 8 X 18.4 for a final area of 147.2 which is 16/25 of 230. This preserves the ratio of the side lengths by simply scaling the patio.

I think the point of this question was to get the students to be creative with their answers. if it wasn't for the fraction and the wording it might have been fine. After finding the new area, you can make it equal to the formula for area of any shape, like a circle or a square. the new dimensions of the patio could be a circle with the radius= sqrt(Area/pi).

I'm probably thinking wrong but just want to understand why not get the dimensions by multiplying the height and width by 16/25(.64) giving us the dimensions of 6.4x14.72. Height and width = area and we are reducing the area of the patio by 9/25 with the greenery leaving us to be 16/25 of the patio.

The way I interpreted the question was use the original dimensions and reduce it by 9/25. So the thing I came up with was 10*(9/25)= (18/5) and 23*(9/25)= (207/25) then subtract both of those dimensions from the original to get the final dimensions. So 10 - (18/5) and 23 - (207/25). 6(2/5) x 14(18/25) if I did my math correctly.

Cool video man

I actually took the long way by turning 9/25 into a percentage i.e. multiplying the numerator or denominator by 4 getting 36/100 =.36 then multiplying the original area by the decimal 230 x .36 = 82.8 My understanding of "reduced by" was taking away 9/25 of the original area so my answer would've been 147.2 ft^2 , but I'd understand how someone would get confused at the wording. My math teacher was too lazy to really help, if I had a question she'd just repeat the problem and not explain it. Just simply say "re-read the textbook". Not saying all teachers are like this just that mine was.

We have the same questions here in the UK for our GCSE grade students. I am currently at the end of my degree and it's been a case where it's so obvious how out of date this form of education and examination is now...It does seem to me that the Lv2 Qualifications are over-engineered and tasked to ensure students Fail.

I liked this video. The guy solving the problem sounded like Bennett foddy

"reducing the area" means you are subtracting 9/25ths from the overall area of 230ft...

"Seems like its ment to trip people ip rather than test if they understand it" Ah I see you've discovered the American education system

The correct answer is 9.06ft by 9.06ft, ((10*23)/25)*9=x, the square root of x is one side of the deck assuming its a square afterwards, yw millie

Where do the 16 and the 25 come from; also I might just be forgetting but since when did the problem specify the number of rectangles within the patio area??? It just seems like a silly problem that I both worked horribly and that doesn’t give enough information to clearly come up with an answer; it reminds me of a time where I got the answer correct in an open ended math question and showed all of my work but got a 0 on it because I didn’t do it the exact same way that the substitute had on the answer key (she taught for a few weeks while our teacher got sent for jury duty)

Good job

So the answer can be 10 by 23 if you take out the middle nine pieces.

I just got finished with AP Calculus last month, and I could barely even figure it out.

Multiply each side by 9/25 and subtract that from the original side length. Will edit when I learn if I'm right... Edit: No idea if I was right. Only thing I "learned" (more of a re-affirmation) was that those worded math problems only serve to see if you withstand being tricked.

What I did was I took 23x10=230 then the fraction 9/25 is 9 divided by 25 is 0.36 so finally 230x0.36 is 147.2ft that was the answer I would have put down.

While the answer isn't wrong, the most practical way that it would make sense in my mind of taking off 36% of the total area is from 1 side instead of 2. Preferably you would keep the 10' dimension and cut part of the 23' side down since that would make sense construction wise. That would also remove the factoring aspect. So you would cut up the deck into 25 equal 10' sections side by side and take out 9 which would be roughly 8'3" and some change. So the New deck would still be 10' but by ~14'9". A wrap around garden is nice but fuck that lol.

Me n Jesse watching

This is by far the most overlooked question I have seen It is so simple and don't go telling me all about the unknown because in math u dont need to care about the unknown unless it is asking or providing in this case all u do I find the area 230ft^2 then subtract 9/25 and that's it the answer is 229.64ft^2

Actually the quadratic formula can be used to keep the ratio of patio. Still a bad question for sure.

I had a understanding of 9th grade math in 3rd grade and when i was in 10th i had to tell my teacher she was wrong(she tell me am wrong and dont know math because her cheat sheet in the book and other number) so walk up to the black board and show her up but there need to have a rework note i was in the math time period were someone was thinking teaching 10 and 9 at the same time was a good idea

isnt an equasion system combined with proportion the most elegant method? Of course with the note that the shape left for the padio after making a garden is the same as before ?

The education system should be completely overhauled or even abolished and rebuilt from the ground-up anew.

Im not sure if this is true, but you would have to multiple a length by 9/25 then take the product of those numbers snd subtract that by the length, like 10 times 9/25 equals x then 10 minus x equals the new dimension

I hate math for this exact reason. No problem is ever worded in a way that is easily understandable. If they were I'd go into it much happier knowing that I understand what's going on. But instead I'm already irritated and flustered before I even start answering

I removed 9/25 of the total area (I actually took the 16/25 of that area since I was too lazy to type it out on my calculator) and I divided it by ten, the length, to get the width. Gave me 10 × 14,72 which is also a good answer, I believe. Pretty sure some 13 year olds could do this problem that way, no sweat.

I'm glad i got out of school before i could get hit with shit like this because i always liked math because no matter the problem there is ALWAYS a definitive answer 2+2 will always be 4. But now they try to fuck with you like this and wonder why students fail or hate school.

Reduce by 9/25 means reduce by 9/25 just because everyone missed that you need to multiply by 16/25 doesn't mean it was worded badly. What was bad was that it didn't mention whether the new dimensions needed to be a scaled down version of the original or if you could just change the sides willy nilly to equal the correct area.

ye

I really hope Millie sees this

Ok, admittedly I was always pretty good at math, and I'm currently taking a math heavy major in college. But I'm curious about all the people in the comments section going "lol, yeah, this is just the american education system in a nutshell. poorly worded questions just to make math feel harder than it is" I don't recall at any point in school having to deal with such ambiguously worded questions. I always got A's, most times knew exactly what each word problem was asking me to demonstrate, and MAYBE there was the oddly worded question here and there, but I don't remember that being a constant recurring problem and certainly nothing the teacher couldn't clear up pretty easily. This problem though, yeah, I dunno what the hell it's on about. Maybe my school was different.

I don't understand why you settled on the final patio shape you did at honestly, or if there was even a good reason for it. I got the correct area pretty quickly, but I just decided to assume the width of the patio was ten feet as there was no information given to suggest otherwise. Made getting the final solution much simpler since I just had to divide the area by 10 to find the second side.

This is either a Kobayashi Maru-type thing to teach the students some valuable lesson, or this teacher's the type of prick who'd tell her students "Most of you will not pass this class" at the beginning of the school year if she were a college professor

I love how this shows how horrible school teaching/homework is (im in uk btw though) If this one question has tons vids online showing how bad it is.

I wonder if her teacher was shown that clip of the podcast

so youre telling me, i could be perfectly fine at math, i just got given poorly written questions which made me feel like an idiot for no reason??? i dropped math because i genuinely thought i was too stupid for it but now youre saying that that probably isnt the case??? im gonna cry

14.27 wide by 6.4 long. Would be my answer.

So why do you take the square root of the 16/25 again???

So my 7.22 by 16.6 was wrong... damn it

So... these questions are basically more about tripping people up/confusing people then actually getting them to use what they've learned to figure out a question?

Everybody hates fractions? Fractions are the easiest way to do these kinds of questions.

The United States Educational System, everyone

i got 10ft by 14.72ft