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Hang In There- Word Problems Get Easier |
By:
Dale Viviano |
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Like most kids, I did not have a very high opinion of work problem games when I was in school. To me, word problems were always a pain in the neck, and often terrifying. Although I was pretty good at plugging in numbers and doing a problem, once it came to translating it into real-world situations I was stumped. I simply couldn't make the bridge between one level of thinking in the other.
For me, there was no magical solution to my difficulties with world problems. I had to keep chugging away until I finally got it. This has informed my philosophy of teaching considerably. You see, few people really think about how important doing word problems is. Getting important math skills down is crucial, but understanding how to apply them to the real world is even more critical. It teaches you analytical thinking skills. Math is one of the most concrete things that you learn to do in school, and being able to think about it as a way to solve real-world problems that you will run into in your everyday life is a great way to start to understand the importance of what you are learning.
Unfortunately, few adults and fewer students understand the importance of word problems. To this day, mathematical illiteracy is a big problem in our society. Basically, most people learn as much math as they need to get by, and promptly forget about the rest. Rather than seeing math as a way to learn about logical thinking, a lot of people to see it as a waste of time – something that they need to do for their taxes, their budget, and little else. The real tragedy here is that math gets very interesting once you get beyond arithmetic. Although word problems involving addition, subtraction, multiplication and division might seem boring when you are doing them, once you get to higher levels of mathematics you realize how interesting it can be to use math to solve real-world problems.
I think one of the biggest issues in education today is how teachers teach math problems. In most classrooms, the emphasis is either on the word problems are on the arithmetic principles that they demonstrate. Few teachers really do both. The tragedy is that students need both in order to succeed. On the one hand, they need to have a firm grounding in the basic mathematics. This is the only way for them to grasp the word problems to begin with. On the other hand, students need to see that what they are learning is important to their life. Knowing that can make it more fun and exciting, allowing the student to get more seriously involved.
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Article Source: http://www.statssheet.com/articles/article52841.html |
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