We’re going through some dark times right now due to the existential threats we’re facing, such as climate change and an increasingly unstable leader of the free world. Everyone could all do with some restoration of their faith in humanity and we got just that in the form of a nine-year-old girl who simply refused to answer a math question because it was offensive.
According to Fox13 (via LADBible), Salt Lake City’s Rhythm Pacheco was doing a math test only to come across a problem that was so offensive to her she outright refused to do it.
For those who are undoubtedly curious about what pushed a nine-year-old girl to (metaphorically) flip her school table, the offensive maths problem read: “The table to the right shows the weight of three Grade 4 students. How much heavier is Isabel than the lightest student?”
Next to the question was a table that listed three female students’ names and their respective weights.
Rather than answer the question, Rhythm instead wrote “What!!!! This is offensive! Sorry I won’t right this its rood [sic].”
Just to really hammer home her outrage, Rhythm also wrote an accompanying note to her teacher that read: “I don’t want to be rude, but I think that math problem wasn’t very nice, I thought that was judging people’s weight. Also, the reason I didn’t write a sentence is because I just didn’t think that was nice.”
From Rhythm’s standing up for her morals right down to the admittedly-adorable typos in her outraged message, everything about this small but inspiring bit of defiance is the ray of light we need during these dark times.
As an extra cherry on top of this “hell yeah” of a story, both Rhythm’s mother and teacher both backed her refusal to answer the offensive math problem, though the company behind the test says it won’t take the question off the test because a similar question involving St Bernard dogs was used in the past and that went down alright with the kids. Oh well, we’ll take whatever victory we can get.
Despite all the crazy and awful stuff that’s happening around this green(ish) earth, it seems that we shouldn’t lose our faith in humanity just yet because young people like Greta Thunberg and now Rhythm are proving that there’s still hope for the future yet.