Sept 18 - Babylonian Word Problems

 I really enjoyed this week's reading as it explores the topic of word problems, something that, in my experience, I have never struggled with and most of my students have. I noticed this pretty early on in my tutoring career that students find word problems difficult because they have trouble representing the scenario using math. I like to think about it as translating from one language (often English) to another (Math). To help my students overcome this barrier, I explored storytelling - I would not show them the written word problem, but rather make up characters and stories to present the scenario. Sometimes it helped, but often students got frustrated because the story was not realistic.

This reading, in a way, comforted me in the sense that I was not doing wrong as the tutor. I explored creative avenues to make word problems slightly easier for my kids and it is just that word problems historically have not been realistic. It is a funny thing to comprehend but it makes sense because word problems are imaginative. You make up scenarios that help you visualize, for example, a boy buying a 100 cantaloupes. For the Babylonians, they had no means to measure a grain pile 18-24 (referring to word problem mentioned on page 6) but they were willing to imagine. Perhaps word problems need not be realistic today, but we can hope for them to be so in the future.