Today I had a student ask me for help on her math homework before class started. The problem was "Billy has seven seeds, the total amount of seeds in front of Billy are seventeen. How many seeds does Sally have?" No joke, that was the question on the homework. I asked the student "where should we begin, how should we solve it?" She told me we needed to draw tally marks to figure it out. She began by drawing seven lines, then below it the total of seventeen marks and then she added them to figure out the total. Yes, I helped her redo it, but the question was horrible!

I am excited to see the answer to our math grid. I remember hating word problems, but I could not pin-point any praticular problem (who can) and seeing this problem and the little girl struggle brought flashbacks.