Read the following problem and think about how a student might solve it. There are 250 students in the fifth grade. Three-fifths of them speak two languages. How many speak two languages? As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been introducing tape diagrams, or bar models, to students and teachers recently as a way to solve word …
Recently, I have been receiving a lot of push back from parents and teaches who don’t think it is worthwhile to expose students to methods other than traditional algorithms. They tell me how they memorized the procedures in math class and they don’t understand why their students or children can’t do the same. They complain about all these diagrams I encourage …
“But I learned it that way”: The case for student-invented strategies Read More »
Recently, I was working with fourth-graders on the following word problem from the 2013 New York State test: Ms. Turner drove 825 miles in March. She drove 3 times as many miles in March as she did in January. She drove 4 times as many miles in February as she did in January. What was the …
They know the math but they can’t do word problems. They can do all the problems on the page correctly, but they skip the word problems at the end. It’s a reading comprehension problem. They don’t understand what they are reading. The dreaded word problem. In many classes I taught, students weren’t used to being …