An Alabama dad turned to the internet for help with his son’s first grade English homework after coming up against a seemingly impossible assignment.
Gary, from Gadsden, who asked that his last name and his son’s name not feature, took to Reddit, posting under the handle u/Thin_Butterscotch827, asking for assistance.
“I posted asking for help because we had no clue what the correct answers could be,” Gary told Newsweek. “It’s been decades since we were in first grade and maybe there was something we could have missed.”
Homework has proven to be a source of frustration for many parents. A survey by the technology company Narbis found that 63 percent of parents polled considered their children’s homework to be a source of stress and frustration.
Gary and his son had more reason to feel frustrated than most though. In truth, most of the assignment had been completed without any issue by the time Gary was asked to help out.
“My son said he was finished except for two of the questions and I tried to help,” Gary said. The assignment asked pupils to complete ten different sentences using one of the following words: fist, fast, puff, pass, hiss, mess, less, gas, mass, and class.
The first sentence read: “The snake will _____ at you.” In this instance, the answer was obviously “hiss.” Another sentence read: “Let’s clean up this ____” with the missing word being “mess.”
So far, so straightforward and that was how it seemed until it got to the sixth sentence: “What’s the _____ of the pen?” Gary suspected it could be “mass” but that didn’t make a whole lot of sense on a first grade homework assignment.
The eighth sentence: “I love my _____” was similarly confusing to Gary as was the ninth which read: “our ____ has white stars.”
Gary decided to go online for help, posting the worksheet with the plea: “My son’s 1st grade homework has stumped me entirely. 8/10 solved I think?”
Reddit/U/Thin_Butterscotch827
He said he shared it because he “didn’t want to be ‘that parent’ that tries to know more than the teacher but is actually wrong.”
Gary quickly realized that others online were equally confused as to what the answers were supposed to be. “This is so confusing,” one user wrote. “Ridiculous assignment,” another said.
Many were also irked at the fourth sentence on the sheet: “there are _____ boys than girls” with the answer appearing to be “less” despite it being grammatically incorrect.
Ultimately, the most likely reason for the baffling assignment was a simple one: an error had been made. One user agreed that the missing word from the sentence “What’s the _____ of the pen?” was likely “mass,” though they were “not sure how a first grader is going to know that.”
The key difference they noticed was for the ninth sentence: “our ____ has white stars.”
“I know it’s not on there, but flag is the only word that makes sense to me,” they said. “Sometimes problems get copied or pasted from different assignments and they forget to change the words. I’m assuming that’s what’s happening here.”
Though Gary might not have got the answers he was seeking when he first shared the sheet, he was satisfied by the responses he got.
“Those that offered their thoughts came to the same conclusion as we did, that there was an error with the worksheet,” Gary said. “It was a relief to know I wasn’t just dumb. There being no obvious answer except that it was an error.”
Gary hopes that by sharing his experience, he might inspire those putting homework sheets together to take that little bit of extra care. “They’ve been relatively fine and matching this format but a few of these on this sheet obviously had issues,” he said.
