This month, Jeopardy! hosted this year’s Kids Week, bringing in some of the best and brightest youths from around the country to participate on the show. Unfortunately, when given the category “Non-Common Core Math,” the kids on the episode failed in spectacular fashion. Check it out, below.
It’s a process to become a contestant on Jeopardy. You have to pass a test and you have to be extremely knowledgeable about a wide range of subjects. So, even when Jeopardy has a week featuring kids or college students, you expect them to be on top of their game. Unfortunately, the kids in this video absolutely suck at the math problems the long-running game show threw at them. Early in the video, after being given a basic arithmetic problem, contestant Tyler’s confidence builds and he asks for the second question in the category. He gets this:
In case you don’t want to use your brain to do the math, the answer is 3. For most of us who have been doing math this way, it’s easy to get to that answer, but it’s almost traumatizing to watch Tyler try to compute the numbers in his head before he inevitably runs out of time. To make matters worse, the other two contestants don’t even bother to give the simple math problem a shot. The same thing happens all over again when they get a multiplication problem:
If we’re being honest, the kid rang the buzzer before he started doing the math and totally cornered himself when it took him to long to get to the answer. Additionally, it’s not as if Jeopardy! never goofs up when choosing categories on the show. But since the two other contestants were also unable to produce the answers quickly enough for the buzzer, the category could be taken as a shot at Common Core standards. Jeopardy doesn’t usually deign to be political, but occasionally the show does create categories that cause a stir, as happened recently when the show put out the “What Women Want” category.
It’s tough to see kids fail at something they care about, but even though Tyler ends up $400 dollars in the red at the end of the category, it’s nice to see he takes the missed opportunity in stride. He may not know much about non-Common Core math, but he certainly made up for it later, winning the episode.
