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Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

marilynburnsmathblog.com

201–210 of 308 posts

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#201
This kind of thing fascinates me. I've always felt that you don't really understand a thing, even a simple thing like fractions, until you can find and resolve all the paradoxes that arise in using it naively.

My take when reading the 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/6 equation is that Addison was right but the "+" here is a different operation than the "+" of 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3. In one case we are adding disjoint parts of the same whole and counting how much of the parts of the whole are now included, and get 2/3, and in the other case we are adding two wholes and counting how much of the new whole is included.

People who pass primary education without internalizing this distinction will have to do so later if they learn statistics or probability theory.

The answer "what would you do now?" is the same one I would try to ask the students. First I would stop, confused, and write 1/3 + 1/3 = ? elsewhere on the board, and then wait for the students to see why I'm confused. They already understand that we want mathematics to be consistent, and getting different answers means we were wrong at least once, but they will have a hard time to find out or explain why 2/6 and 2/3 both are intuitively and obviously right. You have to compare the intuitions directly to each other to see that in one case you're adding parts of the same whole (set or group or table of kids) and in another case adding the wholes.

From what I know of elementary school, we focus a lot on fractions and the formal manipulation of them as unitless values, and drill into kids that 2/4, 1/2, and 0.5 are all "the same thing". Bullshit! It's no wonder they have problems with word problems! Two-out-of-four apples and one-out-of-two apples and a half apple are very different things, as every elementary student knows well. How can we expect them to believe something that's obviously false unless we've introduced the narrow context in which it's true? When used as unitless "coefficients" or bare numbers that exist only to scale another value that represents a real quantity of something, then 1/2 and 2/4 are the same. This is what we should be teaching when we teach fractions, not some mindless rote symbol manipulation like cross-multiplying or what have you without any ability to intuitively derive those rules yourself.

I'd spend the rest of the class time letting them work out all the different ways of looking at it, and the connections to everything else fractions and ratios and addition are good for.

Of course we want to be able to have "+" be well-defined, especially in elementary school, and the students understand that! We've now found a perfectly intuitive meaning of addition for which our standard "+" definition does not fit! This gives an opportunity to explore the connections between mathematics and intuition and the symbols and the real world operations they stand for. It gives us an excellent chance to, as Polya puts it, "introduce a suitable notation" for the setwise addition of "marked" sets that we have just discovered. Then we can explore the properties of this operation and the ones between it and the familiar addition operation. We can show that the plus sign and the addition operation we use it to represent are distinct, and our use of one for the other is a choice, and one we could make differently.

I saw some mentions of units in the comments, and yet 1/3 + 1/3 = ? is still ill-defined if we know only that "1/3" means "one out of three students". What we need to know is which students they are! So if one out of Alice, Bob, and Charlie has red hair, and one out of Charlie, Doris, and Evan has red hair, how many of Alice, Bob, Charlie, Doris, and Evan have red hair? Well, we made the question challenging even for adults if we ask it that way! And now you can introduce uncertainty and degrees of belief. (What if three people tell you they have one red-headed friend, in a class of 23 students? Do they all have the same friend, or is there more than one redhead?)

Of course what most of us will actually do as the teacher in this situation is freeze and think "oh no, I've made a mistake and the teacher (in your mind) is going to point it out and the class is going to laugh at me!". Because that's what we've learned happens in these situations. If we interpret confusion and being wrong as painful and embarrassing, little wonder that mathematics seems a long and painful road that we avoid whenever we can.

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I agree with everything here. Glossing over critical mental models while explaining new concepts is what creates the confusion. Absolutely using drawings would have made things easier. That's a good way to establish those correct mental models. "No you can't do that" is probably not the right approach. The kid's instinct was spot on. The calculation they did was correct, just out of context. Rather than…

I'd absolutely agree if you were tutoring the child one-on-one. My concern is about leading the other 19+ kids astray with a confusing example before they're ready for it. Ignoring it does feel wrong, but I don't know that it is. There's only so much time in a class period, etc. That said, I really liked where mnsc went with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312266

My observation of points at which even very smart people fall off the "math train" k-12:

- Fractions

- Factoring

So yeah, I'd say great care is warranted in teaching kids fractions. Screw that up and there's a good chance you've lost them for life.

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but the tricky part is, how do you explain that to children who are just being introduced to the concept of adding fractions, without leading them off track? That's hard! > The confusion comes because no one calls out that they're talking about fractions of different things. But she did: "When thinking about fractions, it’s important to keep your attention on what the whole is. [...] you’re thinking abo…

I agree. I think many people are thinking the main obstacle here is the mathematical mistake, when the main obstacle here seems to be explaining the mathematical mistake to 4th graders who are learning fractions for the first time. I'm also not sure what the best way to do that would be. If you start with one type of fraction (say, half circles), it's probably easier to intuit things like 5 halves and how much that i…

Not only to 4th graders.

I have a PhD in physics and the more I think about that, the less obvious it becomes (or at least makes you seriously think about it).

The average person is probably in the easiest situation because they learned how to add fractions without further philosophy and they can live happily after.

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#204
post #80
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> x^{-1} means \frac{1}{x}, but f^{-1}(x) doesn't mean \frac{1}{f(x)}. That notation for inverse functions is truly appalling. I don't know how the first mathematician to think of that didn't immediately discard it as nonsensical and misleading.

It's not because 'function powers' make sense, yhey are just iterated function application. That's how they work for the natural numbers and when you extend that to the integers, you immediately get f^-1 for the inverse. Notation in higher level maths is almost always very ambiguous. Because many concepts are analogues of each other and to reflect that notation is just taken from the analogue. Within a single domain,…

> It's not because 'function powers' make sense, yhey are just iterated function application.

To be clear, I think you aren't saying "It's not because 'function powers' make sense" (which seems to apply that's not the reason it's done, and possibly that the reason isn't correct), but rather "It's not [an appalling notation], because 'function powers' make sense"—to me, that extra comma changes the meaning!

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#205
Use pie graphs to show the original tables split up into thirds of one girl two boys.

Then show two ways of combining two tables.

(>-) combined with (>-) is a table of six: 2 girls, 4 boys show all boys and girls moving from tables with 3 seats to the same table with 6 seats.

Now show a table with three seats, one occupied by a girl. Show another table with same configuration. One girl moves from one table to join the first table. 1/3 full + 1/3 full (at the same table) is 2/3 full.

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#206
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiplication is a function of numbers, and function composition is a function of functions, so neither is an instance of the other (unless you take the unusual perspective of thinking of numbers themselves as functions, but I don’t think that’s what you meant).

> I don’t think that’s what you meant Why not? Multiplication is a composition of addition, and addition is a composition of the successor function. The successor function is not a composition of anything, but you can define it in terms of set theory if you don't want to simply accept it as a primitive. But sets are functions too.

In both of these instances, I think that you are using composition to mean iteration. Iterating is repeated self-composition, so it is composition, but it seems likely that you meant the more specific term. (For example, "the successor function is not a composition of anything" is definitely false in the literal sense of composition. It's also false in the literal sense of iteration, but there it's clear what you meant: there's no natural operation which we iterate some number of times greater than 1 to get the successor function.)

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#207
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised I haven't been seeing more discussions about education recently on HN and everywhere else.

I suspect we skew young enough on here that most of us don't (yet?) have kids.

I very strongly suspect that’s not true.

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#208

The units are missing, and I think that's a key factor here. Both of the equations up on the board at the end are correct because they are counting different things. This is a huge miss if you use a numeric only approach to fractions. The student came up and wrote 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/6. What they meant by that is 1/3 (of the students at a table) + 1/3 (of the students at a different table) = 2/6 (of the students at those t…

You're right, but the tricky part is, how do you explain that to children who are just being introduced to the concept of adding fractions, without leading them off track? That's hard! > The confusion comes because no one calls out that they're talking about fractions of different things. But she did: "When thinking about fractions, it’s important to keep your attention on what the whole is. [...] you’re thinking abo…

There is no track!!! Of course there is, because what we call mathematics education is broken beyond repair, but that's a crime.

Shutting down the student's curiosity about perhaps the only thing of mathematical interest that happened all day is not the best you can do.

Do you think you know what the basics are? Are you sure you know which example is confusing and which simple? Are you sure that ignoring confusing anomalies is the best habit you want the next generation of engineers or statespeople to learn as a reflex from an early age?

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#209
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but the tricky part is, how do you explain that to children who are just being introduced to the concept of adding fractions, without leading them off track? That's hard! > The confusion comes because no one calls out that they're talking about fractions of different things. But she did: "When thinking about fractions, it’s important to keep your attention on what the whole is. [...] you’re thinking abo…

1/3 of one table = 1 student. 1/3 of two tables = 2 students. 1/3 of one table + 1/3 of one table = 2/3 of one table. 2/3 of one table = 1/3 of two tables. 1/3 of one table + 1/3 of one table = 1/3 of two tables. -- It would take a lot longer to explain than to write, but that's how I'd be tempted to proceed. As far as learning the basics, it sounds like this class was just getting them introduced to the concept of f…

It’s 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3, and 1:3 + 1:3 = 2:6 = 1:3.

You add slices of pie thus /, and win a vote by ratios thus :.

Re: Can 1/3 and 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so

#210
> What would you do now???

I would probably start crying, to be honest.

But in all seriousness, this is the kind of thing that makes me dread teaching. I mean, I know what is wrong, I just can't wrap my head around how to explain it, specially without going into stuff that would be too advanced for these particular students.

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