1.
Word problems. You remember them. I know you do. You remember hating them. I know you did. Certainly my students do. They don’t even try to disguise their groans when I assign a few.
On this day, I had them write their own. That was the assignment. Not to solve a word problem. But to take a sample of mine and write a different word problem based on it. Radioactive decay. Bacterial cell growth. “1, 2, 3, go!” I said, and the rest of the period was theirs.
I don’t think they knew quite what to think. But… there were no groans.
2.
He came up after they’d been at it for a while. He came up to me, looked me in the face with a broad smile on his and said, “I’m having fun writing word problems!”
He clapped his hands three times.
And with that smile still on his face, he turned around and went back to his desk.