Jason Plautz
Math Homework I Wish I Still Got
by Jason Plautz - October 15, 2008 - 10:58 AM

Call me a nerd (hey, I do write for Mental_floss), but I kind of miss my math homework. Back in the days before algebra and trig, math homework meant math problems embedded in intricate stories, arithmetic trickery and the occasional logic puzzle. In short, they were the kinds of puzzles that people secretly love to do in their free time. But once high school hit, math problems got a lot more tedious and complex and less fun. Now that I’m in college, I’ve completely ditched math and if it weren’t for my obsession with sudoku and kakuro, I doubt I’d use my left brain at all.

So, for the sake of geeky nostalgia, here’s the kind of homework I wish I could still get from math classes. Be sure to chime in with the problems you couldn’t wait to get home to do.

Hanging Balance Problems

6h2_balance2.gif

Different shapes hang in balance in elaborate, mobile-like structures. With just a few clues, it was up to you to figure how much each shape weighed in order to keep everything in balance. Looking back, those balance problems were just a sneaky way to get 5th graders thinking about algebra, but making equations with triangles and cubes is way more appealing than thinking in terms of x’s and y’s. These were by far my favorite form of math homework- I would even ask for extra problems and often my parents would even make their own copies to make math homework a family affair.

Crossfigures

I like crosswords. I like math (to a point). So the crossfigure seemed to be the best of both worlds. The crossfigure is just a crossword puzzle, only with numbers. The clues often played off each other (like “29-across minus four”), so solving them involved some knowhow. I didn’t get them as homework so often, mostly just as a fun break from the daily grind.

branham_d_dejay_sm.jpg

Bobo’s Word Problems

Sadly, I can’t give you many details on this- Bobo was a character in a series of word problems I was given for a class. Something about having a recurring character (especially one that I imagined to be a clown) just made word problems a little easier to swallow. In fact, I liked the Bobo problems so much, my sixth grade math fair project was just a series of Bobo’s adventures that I solved.

Anything related to sports

Even though calculus had it’s fair share of word problems, they just weren’t real enough situations. When will I be trying to figure out the volume of a tank of oil that is simultaneously being filled and drained at different rates? Even the old-school arithmetic problems were a little hard to grasp- who shares apples anyways? But sports made word problems easier to handle. Figuring out different ways to make an NFL team score 20 points or figuring out a pitcher’s ERA made math fun. Thankfully, fellow blogger Sandy was able to bring back that feeling with this Brain Game last month.

« Previous Post   -   Next Post »
Click here to get a Risk-Free issue of mental_floss magazine
Comments (22)

  1. There was nothing in particular I enjoyed in grade school, but in high school I looked forward to matrices.

    posted by susan on 10-15-2008 at 11:46 am

  2. ACK! Clown!

    *hides

    posted by Johnny Cat on 10-15-2008 at 12:00 pm

  3. I confess: I am and always have been a big math fan. So I feel really cheated that I never assigned those balance problems. I’m glad that I get to do them now though!

    posted by HeyBeckyJ on 10-15-2008 at 12:17 pm

  4. You can do my homework for me!

    posted by natalie on 10-15-2008 at 12:25 pm

  5. Am I the only one who feels compelled to solve the hanging balance problem?

    posted by Jilayne on 10-15-2008 at 12:34 pm

  6. I loved the balance problems so much that my teachers used to give them to me to shut me up when I finished early on exams. But soon I got too good at them, and they ran out of the puzzles, so instead I was assigned to make them.

    The spool was my favorite shape, and I always made it the most ubiquitous.

    posted by Nathan Miller on 10-15-2008 at 12:34 pm

  7. Ack! No balance problems!

    I was always a huge fan of polynomials in Jr. High and High school. And during study sessions for the GRE, I learned to love the order word problems–the ones where you have 5 hats all different colors and you have to figure out what order they’re in based on the hints. Those were always fun.

    Yeah, I’m into simple math. What can I say? I was an English major.

    posted by nutmeag on 10-15-2008 at 12:41 pm

  8. I loved geometric proofs. We’d get a diagram of eight or nine intersecting lines and have to use theorems to prove that an angle on one end of the tangled mess was equal to an angle on the other end through a complex series of logical deductions.
    My son tells me this isn’t done any more – and I was so looking forward to checking his homework.

    posted by Lorie on 10-15-2008 at 1:14 pm

  9. @ Jilayne:

    Nope, I just solved the one here. I could have left work an hour ago, but I got busy surfing and just as I was about to leave I saw this and had to stay until I finished it.

    Am I the only one who prefers to work with letters over shapes? I reassigned all the shapes to be letters A-G while solving. I guess it takes extra time, but my brain can work around it faster.

    posted by Bri on 10-15-2008 at 3:57 pm

  10. i started with x and x+1 based on the hints given, and started totalling everything based on X. circle on the right is then 2x+1 and so on. that was fun. :-)

    posted by dorie on 10-15-2008 at 4:11 pm

  11. I love math and any sort of math puzzle you can come up with (can’t promise to solve them – just to love them).

    I hate the IQ test ads.
    “Must not solve. Will lead to spam”

    posted by Bryan on 10-15-2008 at 6:07 pm

  12. Ugh! Math for me has always been like trying to learn Mandarin from a Russian text book. And I think the clown is mocking me.

    posted by Pam on 10-15-2008 at 6:32 pm

  13. i completely agree with the calculus! really, when WOULD you need to find the volume of an oddly-shaped tank that is being drained and filled at the same time? especially when you could just put some kind of electronic monitor in it. i really didn’t like calculus.

    posted by kelly on 10-15-2008 at 9:35 pm

  14. Volume of a tank? Who cares about that? Calculus for me was *central* in HS. It was everything earlier mathematics was building up to. It described nature: it allowed you to calculate rates of change, distance travelled with variable v, etc, etc. The universe in simple mathematical rules!

    posted by merops on 10-16-2008 at 12:30 am

  15. I love puzzles in general, but some are my Achilles’ Heel. Balance problems are one such type; diagramless crosswords are another.

    posted by Michael on 10-16-2008 at 1:52 pm

  16. Its sad that not many people take math as an enjoyable activity anymore….:(

    posted by MyMathGenius on 7-10-2009 at 2:49 am

  17. Check Project Eureka (http://projecteureka.org/problem) out, you can always find some interesting problems there. That’s what I do when I feel the need for a brain gym’n'tonic.

    posted by Robert on 10-2-2009 at 6:59 pm

  18. I always loved the logic matrix problems. You know, the ones that say “Sally, John, Annie, and Bob all have ice cream cones of chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, and mint…” and then you get clues to try to figure out who had what. I would always do extra of those when they were assigned.

    Otherwise, when it came to the actual numbers–I hated math.

    posted by Kerri :D on 2-7-2012 at 10:04 am

  19. My third-grade daughter is getting crossfigure assignments; she enjoys them very much! Her first step is always to go through them and deduce which problems she actually doesn’t need to solve because they are solved by the crossing problems. (Ones like “an odd number”, which is clearly too vague to be helpful, but is filled entirely with crossing solutions.)

    posted by Calli Arcale on 2-7-2012 at 10:12 am

  20. I hated regular math, but give me my 10th grade geometry notebook back (because I can’t remember all the theorems) and I will solve your proofs all day. I loved Geometry…part of it was a great teacher, but for some reason it just clicked in my brain and magically made sense.

    posted by Fruppi on 2-7-2012 at 3:20 pm

  21. The 9th grade math teacher that is next to my classroom uses crossfigures all the time.

    posted by chris n on 2-7-2012 at 10:17 pm

  22. I used to give my students Sudoku (back when it was called Number Place), but when kids started finding apps that solved them automatically, I changed my puzzles.

    Now I give students Strimko, Battleship, and Hexatrex puzzles, and if I could find more Sujiken puzzles, I’d give those out, too.

    posted by Michael on 2-8-2012 at 11:19 pm

Comment

commenting policy