In Norway, children are encouraged to pose a problem that they can solve using an arithmetical calculation. This is known as 'regnefortelling'. During a larger project, we became interested in a small group of "regnefortelling" which used unusual contexts, contexts that made us uneasy and invoked a feeling of uncertainty about how we would respond to the students. To better understand how these feeling of uncomfortableness and uncertainty could be linked to students' possibilities to learn, we consider how our reactions are linked to issues of power and our (unconscious) acceptance of a hidden curriculum about what school mathematics problems should or should not be.