Stories of Subbin' #1 - Elementary Car Mileage

(disclaimer: I didn't really proofread this. Sorry if it's horrible. >.< )

I recently subbed in an elementary school for a 4th/5th grade class (they rotate classes). Even though they rotated, I wound up having to teach most of the subjects throughout the day. Around here, it's rare that you find a school that fully "preps" their 5th grade for middle school by putting them on a class-by-class rotating schedule.

Anywho, I had an episode during math that made me smile.

The class I had was preparing for a math test on the next day. Among the many topics they had to bs their way through practice were various word problems. Just addition and subtraction for now, but word problems nonetheless.

If you don't happen to remember simple word problems, the biggest part of them is usually figuring out if you're supposed to take the info (read: the numbers buried in the irrelevant story) and add, subtract, or shoot your hand up and yell "I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT IT'S ASKING!!". The angle of this story, however, is about an unfairly foreign fact to this age of kids.

So, there was one problem about some lady taking a road trip. Her "mile gauge" read _____ miles after the trip, and her trip was somewhere like 2,000 miles or something (remember these are elementary kids, they had solid numbers, not X & Y variables). What did her "mile gauge" read before she took the trip.

(Note: I can't remember the exact wording the question used for "mile gauge", but it did not say odometer. It obviously shouldn't 'cause elementary kids wouldn't know what in the heck an odometer is anyway.)

Now for you, me, and probably anybody reading this post, we all know this is a subtraction problem.... that's because we're old enough to know how an odometer works. It starts from 0, fresh outta the factory, and tolls it's way up as it's owner suffers day-in and day-out from the unfortunate grind of life.

How do we know this, though? Probably because we've sat in a friggin' car and actually looked at an odometer. ......... ya think an elementary kid has done that yet? NO. -laughs- So, when I read the problem and called on a student to tell me if it was addition or subtraction, it actually blew my mind when he said "addition".

I didn't immediately blast the student for being wrong (that's a pretty bad thing to do as a teacher, especially with young kids). Just like every other problem I've done so far, I asked the kid "why do you say it's addition?" And even with some of the others trying to stealth in some "it's subtractions"s, the kid continued and said~~

"You have to add because you have to see how many (miles) it had before the trip."

...I kinda stared blankly for a second, then it snapped in my head that yeah~~ this is actually a bad standalone problem because they probably need some simple background information. Before I could get my next statement out, another kid blurted out "Yeah! Don't cars run out of miles? You have to add them back to see how many you started with."I flat out laughed at this point. Couldn't help it. And the parapro who was in the room with me smiled from the back as well. At that point, I asked the class "How many of you think a car starts out with some number of miles... like 500,000, and it breaks when it gets down to 0?" About 60% of the class raised their hand.As you're sitting there grinning, think about this for a second. If a kid doesn't know how an odometer works, that actually is a reasonable answer. If cars actually blew up right when they went from some magical number to 0, it'd make perfect sense for you to actually count down rather than up. Therefore, the majority of that class would have been right to add the miles back on to figure out how many they started with.

But it doesn't work like that. And it was comically sad to say most of them got the question wrong simply because they're not old enough to sit behind the wheel

-shrug- Lucky for them, it was practice. And lucky for me, it was just another simple Story of Subbin'


of their dream cars. ;w;