The moment a student sees a paragraph instead of an equation, a wall of fear goes up. It's time to dispel that fear.

The fear comes from not knowing where to start. A word problem feels like a chaotic, unstructured mess.

Your first mission is to transform that chaos into order. The tool for this is translation.

A word problem is just a simple equation that has been written in a foreign language (English).

Your job is not to solve it at first. Your only job is to be a translator.

Read through once. Don't do any math. Just understand the story.

Read through a second time with a highlighter. Pull out every number and every keyword ('is,' 'more than,' 'per').

Create a dictionary. 'is' means =. 'more than' means +. 'of' means *.

Identify the ultimate unknown—the thing you're being asked to find. That is your 'x'.

Now, slowly translate the sentences of the story into a single mathematical equation. The fear is gone because you now have a simple puzzle.