Babylonian Word Problems

 Word problems have the potential to deepen understanding in students, but it also has the ability to further the divide between a student and the subject matter. By needlessly adding a layer of complexity to a problem, students may disengage. These problems will only maximize their potential for learning when the problems reflect the real world authentically, not just needlessly shoehorning a random scenario that is not likely in the real world.

Done properly, world problems can show a student the practicality of the knowledge they are learning. A student can see that this knowledge has a use in the real world. By implementing multiple word problems into a single unit, it can also show students just how versatile and general math concepts can be through a process of un-abstraction. Again, if this is done un-authentically, a student could see this as “See! This topic is so useless that my teacher could only come up with this random scenario.”

Educators have been making up inauthentic word problems that only test learner’s knowledge in a practicality vacuum for thousands of years. Even in Babylonian times, these problems focused more on exemplifying a pure math concept instead of focusing on how one would actually apply math in a real world problem. But just because this problem has existed for so long, doesn’t mean that it is unsolvable. I believe that if the proper time and energy is put into formulating these problems authentically, students will truly benefit from them.