Teachers struggle with getting students to transfer finite math skills to the application of solving word problems. Why is that and what’s the solution to solving these problems?
Let’s first think about exactly what a word problem is and its purpose. A word problem is just a real-world scenario that provides students an opportunity to think, analyze, and solve. The term real-world is used very loosely here because most of the word problems that publishers create are a far departure from the real-world lived experiences of students. But, that’s another problem for another day. Think of word problems as life. And, math allows us to explain and solve problems in life.
So why do so many students struggle when their teachers ask them to transfer the math skills that they learn and seem to be capable of doing to solving word problems? A teacher recently told me that it’s the thinking that her students can’t do. When it comes to thinking on their own, almost none of them can do it. I would partially agree with this statement but then ask, if our students can’t think, whose fault is it? And, if we aren’t teaching them to think, what’s the point of anything else?
The way that you teach students to be great thinkers and problem solvers is very simple. You start with the problems that need to be solved. And I don’t mean determining which train arrives at Chicago first. The students who I teach have most likely never been on a train, been to Chicago, or cared about which train gets there first. That word problem about trains and Chicago is just more make-believe in a school day full of fake make-believe experiences.
So math explains the world around us and allows us to solve problems that we have. Please start with the world around your students and the problems that they have. And don’t think about the problems that they might have or the things that they might care about. Ask them, talk to them, and know them. Make your math problems real, authentic, and engaging. Start with THEIR lives and allow them to use math to explain their lives and solve their problems.
You may be a math teacher reading this now and thinking, I can’t start with those things because my students need to know the basics first. So I’ll ask the question, which came first, math or life? The answer is obviously, life. Math explains life. It’s not the other way around but that’s the way it’s presented to students every day in classrooms throughout the country. To teach our students to be great thinkers and problem solvers we just can’t tack that part on at the end. Students must be immersed in the thinking and problem-solving process. These problems must be things that are real and familiar and most importantly, that need to be solved.
If we start to teach this way more students will care about math and what we are teaching them to do. Because then we are teaching them about their lives and how they can be successful rather than how to do an isolated problem that means little and transfers to nothing.
There is certainly more to creating a great math classroom or any classroom built on this model but this is a foundation from which to build. Start with life. Start with student lives and what they know and care about. And always stay focused on the goals of thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. If we teach in this way students can’t help but get the right answer to that train problem someday to make someone somewhere happy.
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