If a train leaves Chicago heading west at 7:35 a.m., and another train leaves Portland heading east at 8:15 a.m., and both trains are traveling at 55 miles per hour, and you are a passenger on the westbound train, where will you be when the two trains cross paths?
If you're a teacher, you'll be in heaven. Word problem heaven. Word problems have it all: critical thinking, extraneous information, drama (will the trains collide?!), names that are hard to pronounce, super inexpensive grocery store items... What's not to like?
Let me be clear: teachers like word problems, but they love outdated, impractical, and/or politically correct word problems.
When math textbooks are updated year to year, the publishers clearly don't take the rate of inflation into account. Why else would Kenneth go to the store for a ten-cent hamburger? What store sells hamburgers for ten cents? Teachers like these problems because it gives them a chance to reminisce about the days when burgers only cost a dime. It also gives students an unrealistic outlook on economics, which is fun to laugh about in the teachers' lounge. ("I saw Joey at Burger King, and he was shocked that his hamburger cost a whole dollar! You should have seen the look on his face!")
Impractical word problems are also a favorite among teachers, and they fall into two categories. The first category is word problems in which the characters do unusual things or buy weird items, such as "Jimmy rode his bike 3 miles to Dan's house and 8 miles to the soda shop," or "Carrie bought six pieces of saltwater taffy and five feet of rope," or "Nick bought a nuclear power plant for five million dollars." (I'm not joking. I have seen that problem before.) Writing word problems gives teachers a chance to exercise their creative muscle. They can write about happier times, when kids rode their bikes outdoors, unsupervised, or when kids hung out at the soda shop. They can write about kids who go to the hardware store to buy doorknobs. Teachers who write word problems before lunch always, always write about buying food.
The second category of impractical word problems includes characters who pay with nonsensical amounts of money. An example is "Jesse bought a banana for $1.25. He gave the cashier $3.00. How much change should he get back?" Why would Jesse give the cashier an extra dollar? Does this math problem take place in the future or in an alternate reality, where three-dollar bills exist? Teachers think that these word problems are "tricky," but really they just encourage students to hand wads of bills to the cashier with no regard for how much they are actually paying. Kids like little Jesse are basically saying, "You can give me any amount of change. I have no way of knowing if you're ripping me off." Good news for merchants; bad news for our future generations of weird-item-buyers.
Finally, teachers really really love politically correct word problems. The definition of a politically correct word problem is one that contains names that children will not be able to pronounce. A word problem about Jim is not politically correct. A word problem about Xavier is. A word problem about Benito and Fatima is super politically correct and should be published in a textbook somewhere. When writing word problems, be mindful of the names you use. It is a good idea to use at least one name you have never heard of. Try the names out on a colleague. If a fellow teacher cannot pronounce a name, you know you have struck gold.
