Published On: February 28th, 2016|

Noodle – A.K. Whitney

“Ahh, word problems. They too often evoke dread in math students. Just as frequently, math teachers — particularly if they’re new to the business — have trouble understanding why. Ben Orlin, an Oakland-based high school math teacher and writer, describes this phenomenon in his popular blog Math With Bad Drawings: “I was shocked to find how fervently my students despised the things they called ‘word problems,’” he writes in the aptly titled post “The ‘Word Problem’ Problem.” “They treated ‘word problems’ as some exotic and poisonous breed.” His students felt that word problems “had nothing to do with the main thrust of mathematics, which was apparently to chug through computations and arrive at clean numerical solutions.” After pointing out that most of the world’s practical math, in fact, aims to solve problems in finance, science, or design, Orlin recasts the role of these mathematical objects of loathing: “Word problems aren’t an invasive species. They’re the whole biosphere.” To be fair to Orlin’s aggravated students (and to be fair to Orlin, who acknowledges this), the word problems in far too many textbooks and standardized tests seem very disconnected from students’ lives.”(more)