Rythm Pacheco is a student from Salt Lake City, Utah, and she was given a strange maths question in which she was asked to calculate how much more one fictional student weighed than another.
“The table to the right shows the weight of three Grade 4 students. How much heavier is Isabel than the lightest student?”
The table even listed the names and weights of the three students.
Rythm was unhappy with the question mentioning girls’ weights, so she wrote a little letter to her teacher. This is what the letter read:
“What!!!! This is offensive! Sorry I won’t right this it’s rood.”
The 9-year-old told Fox13 that she thought it was offensive because girls shouldn’t be comparing each other. She realizes that it was a math problem, but she doesn’t think that was really Okay, and she believes using fruits or vegetables instead of girls would suit the math problem more.
Rhythm even wrote a note to accompany the paper which read that she doesn’t want to be rude, but she thinks that the math problem wasn’t very nice, and she thinks that it was judging people’s weight.
Naomi Pacheco, Rhythm’s mom, backed her daughter’s opinion on the test question, and she told the news outlet that she was shocked when she saw the problem too, and she thinks it was a very irresponsible way to teach children how to do math.
The maths paper was given to Rhythm’s school by a company called Eureka Math.
Even though Rhythm’s teacher was supportive of her decision not to answer the qustion, Eureka director Chad Colby said that there’s no value judgment in the question about weight, and it’s merely a comparison.
He added that the company has no plans to take the question off the maths paper.
