By Jack Beresford
Senior Reporter
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A six-year-old girl has been praised for thinking outside the box on her math homework.
In a post shared to Reddit by her doting dad, who asked to be referred to as simply Nick from Long Island, New York, the father revealed the inspired answer she gave to one question centered around a sandwich.
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"Be precise," the question began. "Has this sandwich been cut into equal shares? Tell us how you know." Homework, and particularly math homework, has been shown to have a negative impact on family life.
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Eight families were interviewed about their experiences of math homework as part of a 2022 study published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education.
The research found that not only was the subject disliked by many but it was also deemed disruptive to family life.
Assignments were often seen as too difficult, even with parental help, and often disrupted routines around bedtime and family time, while the children involved experienced frustration and a sense of inadequacy.
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Nick was sitting alongside his daughter when she was doing her math homework and initially felt a pang of concern when he saw what she was putting down as her answer to the math question.
"As she was writing it I'm thinking... wrong answer," he told Newsweek. "I almost corrected her, but let it go, as she wasn't really wrong."
Writing underneath the picture of the sandwich divided, his daughter had explained that the sandwich had not been cut into four equal parts "because the ends are curved and the middle is not."
To Nick's way of thinking, she wasn't wrong. " It was wrong in the context that they are learning basic fractions, but in a vacuum, her answer is correct," he said. Nick said he hasn't spoken to his daughter's teacher but he did notice the answer was marked with a "star" so "he didn't correct her either."
Either way he was "definitely impressed" at her for heeding the question's request to "be precise." "Me and the missus got a nice chuckle out of it," he said. That was what prompted him to post the answer to Reddit.
"I felt like that was too perfect not to share," he said. "I wasn't expecting the amount of traction it got." At the time of writing the post has been upvoted over 8,000 times with users full of praise for the first grader's answer.
"I'd give a child credit for this," one user commented. "When you use real world examples, you have to expect real world solutions. The kid clearly knew it was cut in equal lengths, but he also knows not to take the ends if she's really hungry."
A second, meanwhile, declared: "This kid has a bright future in integral calculus" with a third adding: "Thinking outside the box is a valuable skill, and it is beneficial for educators to demonstrate support for students who exhibit this trait."
Nick is "just proud" at his daughter's response but revealed she is completely unaware of her viral fame. "She's six. We limit her social media presence to zero, and internet time to next to zero," he said. "Instead we read and draw and play. Me and my wife limit our own phone time as much as possible until after she goes to bed."
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