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17th Feb 2022

This eight-year-old’s maths homework question is baffling adults

Charlie Herbert

*Visible confusion*

If you’re a parent you’ve probably gone through the arduous process of helping your child out with their homework and you may have even had the horrible realisation that you’ve forgotten a lot of pretty basic knowledge.

Maths in particular can be many a parent’s downfall.

However one mother, named Dusty Sappington, has stumped the internet by sharing one of the questions from her eight-year-old daughter Izzy’s homework.

The question asks: “Janell had 15 marbles. She lost some of them. How many does Janell have now?”

And that’s it.

A question mark seems like a justifiable answer to that riddle.

After posting the photo on Reddit, she commented: “If someone can answer this correctly, my child will be done with her homework!!”

However even the world of Reddit couldn’t provide the answer.

One replied: “< 15, but I don’t think that’s a fair 3rd grade question.”

Another said: “The correct answer is… ‘some.'”

A third suggested the right answer could be a formula of “15 – x.”

And a fourth simply said that Janell had “lost her marbles.”

Speaking to the Huffington Post, Sappington explained that her daughter has dyslexia and attends a school that offers traditional classes and also specialises in learning disabilities.

She said that the question – and the variety of responses from Redditors – had been a source of amusement for the family.

She said: “I haven’t found out the answer, but hope to see her graded paper soon.

“To be honest, I’m unsure if it was printed in error or was a question to test her knowledge of less than and greater than, which she has touched on in the past.

“Being the mother of a third-grader and a fifth-grader, I have seen a lot of homework over the years that has our family laughing at the absurdities, scratching our heads and relying too much on Google,” the mother added.

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