She can do the sum, but not the word problem

11 August 2026 · by Larry

She can do 42 minus 17 in her head. Not instantly, but she gets there, and she gets there her own way. So when she stopped dead on a question about oranges in a basket — which was 42 minus 17 wearing a coat — I assumed she had just lost concentration.

She hadn't. I asked her to read it out loud to me, and she read it beautifully, every word correct. Then she looked up and said, "so do I plus or minus?"

The question underneath the question

That sentence told me more than an hour of practice would have. She wasn't stuck on the arithmetic at all. She was stuck on deciding which arithmetic — and she was hoping I would tell her, because guessing between two options gives you a fifty-fifty chance and that is better odds than admitting you don't know.

I have since noticed she is not unusual. A lot of children who are perfectly comfortable with numbers freeze at word problems, and the reason is not maths. It is that a word problem asks you to build a little model of a situation in your head, and only then do the sum. The sum was never the hard part.

She could read every word in the question and still not know what was happening in it. That is not a reading problem or a maths problem. It is the gap between them.

What I stopped doing

I used to do the thing that feels like helping: point at the words. "See, it says 'gave away' — so what does 'gave away' mean?" She would say "minus", we would finish the question, and both of us would feel we had achieved something.

We hadn't. I had taught her to hunt for keywords. That works right up until a question says "how many more does he need", where there is no keyword doing the job and the child who is scanning for one is lost. Worse, it teaches her that the words are a code to crack rather than a story to picture.

What I do now

Three things, and none of them involve numbers at the start.

I ask her to tell me the story back, with no numbers. "There's a boy, he had some sweets, he gave some to his sister." If she can do that, she understands it and the rest is easy. If she can't, no amount of arithmetic practice is going to help.
I ask what we are looking for before we do anything. Not "what's the answer" — "what is the question asking us to find?" It is remarkable how often a child is halfway through calculating something nobody asked for.
We draw it. Boxes, a bar, blobs on a page — it does not matter. The moment the situation is on paper instead of in her head, the operation is usually obvious to her without me saying anything. That is the whole point of the drawing: it makes the answer hers rather than mine.

Then, and only then, the sum. Which she could always do.

The part I got wrong for a while

I thought word problems were a harder version of sums, so the fix was more sums. It is embarrassing how long I held that view. More practice at the thing she could already do was never going to touch the thing she couldn't — I wrote about that mistake in a more general way in more practice questions won't help my child, but this was the clearest example of it I have had.

The other thing I got wrong was reading her hesitation as not knowing the maths. When she paused, I jumped in. Now I let the pause sit, for the same reason I stopped timing her — that silence is usually her building the picture, and if I fill it, she never finishes building it.

How you can tell which one it is

If you are not sure whether your child is stuck on the maths or stuck on the story, there is a two-minute test. Read them the same question with the numbers made tiny — three sweets instead of forty-two. If they can suddenly do it, the arithmetic was the problem. If they still can't decide what to do, it was never the arithmetic.

That test has saved me a lot of pointless evenings.

What this means for the practice here

The maths practice on StudyLab is deliberately about the sums — that is what it is for, and it does not pretend to teach comprehension. But the wrong answers are chosen rather than random: each one is a mistake children actually make, so when she picks one, it usually tells me which idea hasn't clicked. If she is getting the sums right here and still stalling on her school worksheet, that is useful information too. It tells me to put the worksheet down and go and draw some boxes instead.

— Larry

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