ABSTRACT
With time and practice, I managed the word problems. For some of my fellow students, however, the math class became a recurring, tearful humiliation, when the teacher wondered aloud in front of everybody why they did not “get it.” What some of my fellow students did not “get” was that the first step in solving a word problem is to translate the problem from one language (in which the concepts and relationships are represented by words) to another (in which concepts and relationships are represented by mathematical symbols).
