Math Assessment

We give the students an internal math assessment three times a year. While looking at the assessments, I noticed that one of the first grade girls made an interesting mistake.

The problem was something like this:

33, 43, 53, ___, ___, ___

She filled in:

33, 43, 53, 36, 37, 38

I looked at that for a while and wondered what she was thinking when she answered that way. She can count after all.

Then I noticed that if you turn 43 around you get 34.

And then if you turn 53 around you get 35.

If that is what she did, she got the problem right. Too bad you cannot write numbers however you want.