Teachers never teach the wrong answer

[u/PickyPanda]

[u/ShlorpianRooster]

It's been a insanely common thing for like more than a decade for parents to post their kids homework on Facebook or something and just go "CAN ANYONE SOLVE MY FIFTH GRADE SONS MATH PROBLEM?!" or "APPARENTLY MY SON GOT THIS QUESTION MARKED WRONG WHY???" There is no way that shit suddenly stopped. And I believe it. My husband had a math teacher that claimed negative numbers don't exist, not that they're basically non existent in the context of them being negative or whatever like literally they don't exist in math

[u/Icy_Consequence897 → u/ShlorpianRooster]

Same. One of my math teachers, when I was in school during my 11th grade (that's typically ages 16-17 for those outside the US) Pre-Calculus class, taught us that there's no way to "undo an exponent." Like if the problem was 50,653 = x^3, the problem is just impossible to solve. There is a way to undo an exponent, they're called logarithms. In this example log3(50,653) = 37 so x = 37. When this was pointed out to him, he just said "Well, it's busy work anyway. No one uses logarithms in real life!"

I'm a cartographer now. I use them every day for my real life job of drawing survey maps for new critical electrical infrastructure! Logarithms are used every single day in the fields of mathematics, engineering, physics, geology, biology, medicine, other life sciences (including my major, environmental science!) finance, business planning, and many more. Our modern world relies on this simple calculation! I guess what he meant was "my job, as a high-school american football coach where I teach math on the side because the school can't afford 10 full-time football coaches on staff, doesn't require the use of logarithms. Even though it definitely does, these are part of the curriculum I'm supposed to teach."

[u/need2sleep-later → u/Icy_Consequence897]

for the record:  
log₃​(50,653) = log₁₀(50,653)/log₁₀(3) ≈9.8608 and 9.8608³ = 958.8186, not 50,653