15 December 2023 , 09:41
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When it comes to helping your child with their homework, you do not expect to end up sitting at the table for an hour trying to answer the same question. But this became one caregiver's reality, with them admitting to "looking up the answer online" because they just couldn't figure it out.
Sharing the tricky task on Reddit, one user said: "My fourth-grade cousin's homework stumped us. Would you have figured it out? I had to look it up online to see if there was actually an answer or if it was just broken." The English question asks students to read through a short story called A Real Cool Cowboy before circling the story's "hidden words" in a word search.
The question reads: "Four words from the story are hidden in the puzzle. The definition of each word is given below. Shade in the letters for each word, reading left to right and top to bottom. The remaining letters will spell the name of a real cool cowboy two times." Then in a list format, it adds: "A piece of writing. Laughingly. Attributed with. A particular form of something."
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While some users were able to figure it out, others were equally as confused, saying "I still don’t understand it, even with the answer shown".
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One user said: "The instructions are lacking here. This reads like a word search (where you look for the letters all in a row) but this is doing something else entirely." Another user added: "I have no clue what I just read."
A third user said: "What a waste of time for a kid to endure that. It is unnecessarily difficult." One more user added: "I got it, but the directions weren’t the best. It was honestly way easier to look for the “pecos bill”s in the puzzle and then work backward to find the words."
Another user said: "I figured it out too but it took me a bit. I read the story and figured out the words but couldn't figure why the letters weren't in a row together like a word search. I first tried marking off the letters randomly throughout the puzzle and that didn't work and then I noticed some letters were left to right so I started at the top and left to right in order.
"The instructions really sucked. I've come across this many times helping my son with his homework. How is a grade school kid supposed to figure it out when a reasonably intelligent adult has difficulty I've complained a couple of times and the teacher usually just agrees with me and says yeah the instructions were weird on that one. I think a teacher dedicated to quality instruction wouldn't give stupid homework like this."