Sunday, December 01, 2013

Word problems

On another blog I mentioned a method of trying to parse word problems I'd used with several of our kids, and from the dead silence that ensued I conclude that people are too embarrassed to ask what it was. Or something.

Blogger is not terribly friendly when I want to use and re-use many small images, so I stashed the whole thing on another web site. The idea is quite simple: look for key words and keep careful track of your units.

2 comments:

  1. Excellent idea. I only read the first parts, as I had gradually stumbled on something like this over the years for myself. Good testers do. Yet I would have liked to have it in this form, particularly for my two Romanians. It is something of a disadvantage when the tester is trying to trick you a bit - or perhaps I should say distract or mislead you - and it is not your first language.

    I am going to go back and check for two of my own hints I passed along (and they work for mathletes too): be careful with the negative signs, especially if it looks like they are trying to double-negative you; and similarly, be cautious about whther you are being asked to divide by two or by one-half.

    I recall even as a student that such questions struck me as not being math, but careful attention to language. That is useful in math, but it's not the same thing.

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  2. What really annoys me is when the tester is merely being sloppy. I've hit too many ambiguous problems over the years...

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