From left to right: 100 grains of rice, 500 grains of rice, 1,000 grains of rice. [Photo from web]

Let's count 1,000 grains of rice

Counting rice may sound like an insane task, but it has actually been set as homework by a math teacher for students in primary school.

A teacher in Changchun of Jilin province has assigned students to count 1,000 grains of rice as homework, reported xwh.cn on Wednesday.

According to the teacher, she wanted students to have a visual and material understanding of numbers, or "a sense of math".

The parents obviously thought differently about this tedious task. Many thought they would help their children complete the dull work and complained that there must be other ways to improve their children's math ability.

This is not the first time we have heard of math teachers asking students to interact with rice: another teacher asked students to weigh 100 grains of rice in March. Back in 2006, it was reported that French students were set the task of measuring how many grains of rice are in 1kg of rice without counting.

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