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At work I'm dealing with a math text which contains word problems like the following:
In designing an industrial robot, an engineer calculates the number of teeth needed for each gear with the expression PN + 2P. Factor this expression.
Is it just me, or does that seem like the most phoned-in word problem ever? It's like they heard somewhere that students prefer problems that connect to the "real world," and also robots.
Seriously. WHAT ARE N AND P. Gears? Teeth? That that is the part students have problems with in algebra: the letters are meaningless. The whole point of word problems is to show that the letters do represent quantities which we know things about (just not their actual value), not to simply showcase a job they don't have in which algebra might be used, but we don't really know how. That silly little line above the actual problem is at best irrelevant flavor text and at worst totally confusing in a maxim-of-relevance-violating kind of way. Students will sit there like, "Okay, P(N+2), I would have thought, but WHERE DO I FACTOR IN THE ROBOTS??"
Sorry, former tutor rant. It just frustrates me when the entities writing the expensive glossy-paged textbooks obviously have no real understanding of how humans learn.
In designing an industrial robot, an engineer calculates the number of teeth needed for each gear with the expression PN + 2P. Factor this expression.
Is it just me, or does that seem like the most phoned-in word problem ever? It's like they heard somewhere that students prefer problems that connect to the "real world," and also robots.
Seriously. WHAT ARE N AND P. Gears? Teeth? That that is the part students have problems with in algebra: the letters are meaningless. The whole point of word problems is to show that the letters do represent quantities which we know things about (just not their actual value), not to simply showcase a job they don't have in which algebra might be used, but we don't really know how. That silly little line above the actual problem is at best irrelevant flavor text and at worst totally confusing in a maxim-of-relevance-violating kind of way. Students will sit there like, "Okay, P(N+2), I would have thought, but WHERE DO I FACTOR IN THE ROBOTS??"
Sorry, former tutor rant. It just frustrates me when the entities writing the expensive glossy-paged textbooks obviously have no real understanding of how humans learn.
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