During Christmas vacation, I was talking with my eleven-year-old daughter about school. She loves math (as do I). I asked her about her experience with word problems, knowing that most of my students struggle with them. She said that they weren’t too bad. Her Algebra 1 teacher assigns her class to both write and solve word problems on a fairly regular basis.
The idea of assigning students to write word problems was new to me, and it sounded like a promising idea. I asked my daughter for more details. She said that writing the problems is easier than solving them. One of her recent assignments was to invent a word problem that could be solved by a linear equation in y = mx + b form.
Meanwhile, my physics students were struggling a little with momentum problems. They understood what’s going on in the problems, but were having a hard time getting the numbers out of the word problems and putting them in the correct places in the equation.
I gave them a few notes on how to construct a typical momentum problem–two objects colliding, with known mass and velocity. The collision could be either elastic (six variables—the two masses, the two initial velocities, and the two final velocities) or inelastic (five variables—the two masses, the two initial velocities, and the final velocity). They needed to choose a scenario or story and assign numbers for all but one of the variable. If they did everything correctly, they should have a solvable problem. Finally, they had to solve their own problem (on a separate piece of paper), then trade problems with someone else and solve each other’s problems.
Sure enough, the process of thinking about what went into the problems made the students understand the problems on a much deeper level than just solving a large number of them. Several students asked if we could do the same exercise for other topics during the year, because it really helped them make a lot more sense of the problems. (To which I replied, yes, absolutely!)
I don’t hold out hope that I can completely make up for seven years of NCLB math without word problems all at once, but this idea looks like it will allow me to make more significant inroads.
sometimes it’s the simplest things that make a big difference, isn’t it? good idea; I’m going to have to try it with my chemistry students.
Bravo, Jeff.
Life is a word problem! You always have to take a situation and figure out how to analyze it; you are seldom given the analysis problem in such a way that all you have to do is chug through the math.
classes, kids almost felt intimidated to ask the teacher for help, for one or more of the following reasons:1-It’s something that’s probably easy (to someone who has a good knowledge/understanding of the topic), and kids will be embarrassed to ask for help on how to clarify it. 2-Kids don’t want the teacher to think Geez, how does the kid not understand THAT? 3-Kids want to create some false confidence, where if we act like we understand , and try to just brush it aside, that it’ll just go away and then the teacher thinks we are smarter because we are understanding at the pace he/she is teaching in class, when in reality that’s not the case. 4-The majority of the class understands, or says they understand. You could say They may be lying but then when kids see those students are getting 90 s and 100 s on tests, we know that those students DO understand and then kids who don’t understand feel pressure, start to feel behind and then lose confidence.I didn’t feel that way in your class and I bet very few did. #3 and #4 happened a little in the beginning, though, but that went away once I got help from you once or twice.As you stated, you are eager to help students and aim to get them to believe in themselves. You have a much friendlier approach to helping students than most teachers do.One teacher I had in particular for geometry, anytime you asked her for help, her reply was (picture Fran Drescher’s voice but more whiny) Oh, you know it. It’s easy, come on! (of course, that coming after a big obnoxious sigh like you were going to make her miss her favorite show or God forbid, do some teaching, as if that’s what she was getting paid to do!) when in reality, I did NOT understand what she was teaching (and that in itself was questionable often, the kids were correcting her ..), and 4th quarter my grade suffered badly, I had about a 71 average for the quarter. And the whole quarter all she said to me when I’d mention my grades was You’ll be fine!! You worry too much well, that’s the reason why! She refused to help me after a week-long illness that kept me out of school for that amount of time. My response when bombing 2 quizzes because I had NO clue on what to do was You’ll be fine ..no attempt or effort to do something to get me to understand.That wouldn’t have happened in your class because first and foremost, you would have actually helped upon my asking, and you wouldn’t have said what I quoted above or the famous Oh come on, I have to leave! , you would have worked through it with me. I had 26 teachers in the 4 years in high school and she was probably the only one that annoyed me at that level due to the pure laziness and lack of interest in helping.Guess they can’t all be winners, keep doing what you are doing!