I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. The best thing I've seen on the subject of word problems is the following piece by Andrei Toom (warning, this is

I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. The best thing I've seen on the subject of word problems is the following piece by Andrei Toom (warning, this is 98 pages long): http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf The claims made in this article seem like the sort of thing Toom is decrying; see section IV in particular. To attempt a summary -- the way math is taught in America is broken, and word problems are horribly misused. Because neither the students nor the teachers really understand math, they attribute their distaste for these useless word problems to the inherent nature of word problems, or to them not being "real-world" enough. Word problems are not the problem; Russian word problems accomplish their goal quite well and are not held in such distaste by Russian students. And no, it's not because those ones are more "real-world". Basically, none of this is the real problem, these sorts of attempts to address it will not help, and attempts to address it by teachers and curriculum-writers who don't actually understand math can actually make the problem worse. But really, I recommend reading the whole thing.