Hacker News Reader

Students don’t like “real world” problems. They say they want more of that but when you actually do those types of problems they complain or do poorly on them. Word problems are even more confusing to students than non-word problems.

The vast majority of so called real world problems aren’t things people who use math in their jobs actually do.

View on HN

I guess you are referring to the "Steve has 17.5 credits, how many pizzas can he buy?" type problems?

For me, when learning calculus it was that it seemed pointless. They were teaching me to do this mechanical task, but why? Why not another task like increasing every other number in the equation by 6? It wasn't until I learnt about velocity and acceleration that it all started to make sense. The task of differentiating/integrating seemed far less important than the understanding that functions have derivatives and anti-derivatives and what that means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com