It’s not common sense, either. That would be too easy.
It’s “girl code.” And it doesn’t license you to solve math problems sensibly, as opposed to writing numbers in weird formations for hours. It excuses you from solving the problems at all.
But, hey: as befits a quantity called “girl code,” it’s cute.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Huffington Post has a write-up. A fourth-grade girl, Maddy Douglas, encountered a rather peculiar word problem in her math homework , describing a high school dating scenario that sounds like the premise of a Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin movie.
In high school, Frank, Mike, George, and Ron each went out on a total of 4 dates with 4 different girls. The second time Frank dated Rose and George dated Kay. The third time Mike dated Mary and Ron dated Louise. The fourth time George dated Louise and Ron dated Kay. For each of the 4 times, tell which girl dated which boy.
Fear not: young Ms. Douglas’s mother questioned the appropriateness of this word problem, and the commenters at HuffPo do too. (Which seems a bit old-fashioned for a nation that wants to encourage 6-year-olds to deem themselves transgendered.)
But Mama Douglas’s influence led Maddy to emphasize a different concern about the problem. Maddy ultimately declined to work it out and answer it, because in her view, it violated “girl code.”
The fourth-grader wrote on her homework sheet (spelling original):
I can’t answer this problem because my Mom says acoording to girl code you shoudent date a friends x boyfriend.
The teacher reportedly laughed and conceded that Maddy had a “good point.”
Mom Jenn Douglas, proud of her daughter’s non-answer, “shared a photo of the question on the HuffPost Parents’ Facebook page with the hashtag #girlcodetrumpscommoncore.”
Did I mention that it isn’t logic trumping post-modern math in this case? The first objection of logic would be that we don’t know that the girls in the problem are friends, or that they even know each other. Not even “girl code” puts the “x boyfriends” of some girl you don’t know off-limits.
But, girlfriends, you know the making of intuitive feminine assumptions is the ruling principle now for math, education, and life. The country’s in the very best of hands.
