Students Hate Word Problems?

I teach high school math, and I can think of two reasons most kids hate word problems.

1. It requires reading, and many students aren't comfortable reading math words, terms, etc.

2. Most word problems involve multi-layers of computations which quickly causes stress - which one to do first...where do I put the numbers......

These can be easily worked out using different colored highlighters to mark what the question really is, how the answer should look, etc.

There are word problems that, rather than enhancing students' abilities seem to be the result of a contest on who can write the trickiest or most confusing or frustrating riddle. When was the last time you saw a word problem with extraneous information that had a warning that the student was expected to filter out and use only necessary data? The neophyte is easily distracted by this, and can spend a great deal of time before finding out their approach does not lead to a solution. A number of these failures can convince students they are inept at math, when this may not be the case at all.

They require a preliminary step of looking over an explanation of a situation and finding a way to express it which is computable to get results. It takes a lot more understanding than just finding "if 4x=20 what is x?" However it is closer to the real life application of the mathematical principles so it is a critical skill.

If they just know math by rote they are thrown by the setup step a word problem requires and it shows them they don't really know what they are doing - and that is scary.

As a student, I know that I hate word problems simply because they throw in an extra complication. You can spend hours mastering the math required to do the problem only to find that if you don't interpret the paragraph right, then all that studying was a waste of time.

It`s a very common problem that we all have to contend with. I think the answer is that word problems often require a reading age far in excess of the student`s actual age, and that this type of question requires a maturity that children just do not have. I find it fascinating to decompose a problem into its mathematical equivalent: it`s quite amazing to find how simple many of them actually are, but it`s very difficult to get a child to do it.

I hate word problems because they are sometimes really hard.

it takes up too much time and can be confusing, many of the problems are not straight forward. it can be useful skill for some in the future, but many would disagree that it will not be used in his or her career

They need more training in doing word problems.

i don't like word problem because it's hard for me to understand and don't know what formula to use.

, it fiddles with mind, well word problems needs lot of breaking down and understanding wat the question actually is asking, we easily get confused, compared to solving the numbers