Word Problems Reflections

I feel like my stance on word problems remains around the same. As a student, I hated doing word problems, because I can’t just do a straight up calculation, but as a teacher, I think word problems are invaluable. Word problems are a way to assess the students’ relational and instrumental understanding, while arithmetic questions only test instrumental understanding. Instead of asking students to give and memorize the right answers, it is more important to assess whether they are able to problem solve their way out of the question given what they know. Through practice, they have probably seen the same questions over and over again, but with word problems, we can always find different ways to ask the question and have the students problem solve in different ways too. However, as brought up in class, it may be detrimental to students whose English is not the second language. With the Leaning Tower example, wording can be quite unclear, and from personal experience, using English to state questions can be quite confusing to non-English speakers. In those cases, I still think word problems can be a great help, and that I would draw plenty of pictures to make myself clear. I also would want my students to draw pictures out too when solving word problems, especially in units that involves finding the area of something.

With the ancient word problems, I find them very fascinating on how practical they all are. I love the idea of collecting taxes for some random Babylonian scribe just by doing their word problems. I think the biggest connection here is the use of guess and check methods. Also mentioned in class, guess and check as been around for many centuries, all the way back in Ancient Babylonian and Egyptian math. I think it’s a very quick and easy way to solve a lot of modern problems too, especially for topics like the quadratic equation. Guess and check provides a lot of value for students since they would need a rough idea of what the answer would be, before finding the exact answer. In my assessments, I would love to have the students to estimate (with no wrong answers) what the right answer would be before tackling the problem. It provides a starting point, and is also very practical. For example, if I were to buy some Pokémon cards, and the total is $160 before taxes, I would estimate that after tax would be $180 (160 x 1.1 = 176, and add a bit more for the 2%). Then, I say I would buy the cards every 3 months, so I am spending around $60 per month, or 3 hours of work (I’m getting paid $21/hr for my part-time job), so it’s not a bad spending habit. Something rough like that is very practical in real life, so word problems would be a great way for the students to get a feel for estimating, guessing and checking, and practice a skill they would definitely use, especially at Costco.