LOL. I see you’ve read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy.”

I coached a math counts team some years ago. We (the team and me) made it to the state championships but not the nationals. Of my two top kids, one just graduated Harvard as a math major and the other is a senior at Yale — also math major. The kids were amazing.

The cutest thing I saw was one of my kids who had a speech impediment and talked very slowly. He was at the podium and got the question “What is the largest integer less than 10,000 that is divisible by 12?” He answered immediately but slowly: “Nine fousan, . . . nine hundwed … and nindy six!” which is the right answer.

Now lgm, did you allow your student to move forward, or did he have to wait till ALL students got it? After all no child is to be left behind

In my view, that instructional program has done more damage to students’ acquisition of basic math skills than is imaginable.

For example, in 1998 – at the insistence of our new principal, the elementary school where I was teaching 7th and 8th grade math at that time implemented the program and went from a ranking of “High Performing” to “Academically Deficient” on our state’s testing system, within the space of two test cycles.

My chief complaint with the program is that although it attempts to deliver sound mathematical theory and alleviate students’ math anxiety, it utilizes a meta-cognitive/self-awareness approach that is too introspective to properly instruct math reasoning strategies and often fails to go beyond the introductory phase in teaching number concepts and manipulation skills.

I hope your continued exposure of this failed math program serves to caution parents and schools across the nation against adopting Everyday Math into the curriculum of their schools – if they want their students to learn real math.

Word problems can confusing to someone who has done them in a while, or was never taught the math terms. My teachers usually referred to the “ones” column as the “units” column for clarity. And most of these specialized math terms are for exactly that reason: clarity and precision.

The majority of my college professors were from the Math & Computer Science Department at St. Joseph’s University, and I took all the way up to Calculus III & Linear Algebra. I sucked at, but I got a good grounding in the terminology.

nicely done … hadn’t taken time to look further like that …

Add all the digits that are in the answer…

11,234 = 11

I don’t like the use of the word distinct. I think they should have stated, “a set of unique positive integers…”

Couldn’t I argue that 1 and 1 are two distinct integers? They may not be distinct from each other, but…nah…I guess not. Math isn’t my problem – vocabulary is!!!

I like the binary answer!!! The questioner didn’t say “in base ten.” However, the rules are probably to assume base 10 unless otherwise stated.

Excellent post, Michelle.

And thanks for the “New Math” song reference. And the binary t-shirt–I may have to send that link to computer programming friends of mine.

Oh, this is so sad. The answer is, in fact, 42. Deep Thought was right. In binary:

1+11+111+11111=101010

and 101010 is, in fact, 42.

That is pretty damn amazing.

You have a collection of “integers” (whole numbers — no fractions or decimals). One number in your collection should be 1. If it’s not, you can make the sum smaller by changing one of the numbers to 1.

Now you have 10 digits left. The next smallest number allowed is 11, so you must use it. Otherwise again you could make the sum smaller by swapping out something for 11. Now you’ve used 1 digits and have 8 to go. You must use 111 (5 to go), then 11111 (the last five digits in one number). It seems surprising to have to use such a big number in the end. If you tried, say, 1111, you would have use only ten digits and have to use the remaining single digit. But that one can make only 1 and you’ve already used that.

The sum is 1 + 11 + 111 + 11111 = 11234.

This is not a terribly hard problem. I would expect the best kids I coached to be able to get it. These kids see lines of reasoning like this almost instantly.

Also, they practice a lot. The problem might seem vague, but if you’ve done dozens like it in practice, you know exactly what it means.

I see no harm in kids doing contests like this. The kids I coached loved it. But don’t mistake it for real math education, any more than you mistake spelling bees for real English.