When Reality and Marketing Collide: Critically Examining MVP's “Real-World Scenarios”

BY GUEST WRITER Hava Edelstein

In my opinion, MVP tries to dress up pretty standard word problems as being way more than the generic rather contrived word problems that they are, the kind that are pretty standard in mathematics textbooks. And that is fine.

The difference is that other textbooks aren’t claiming that their contrived word problems are instead Engaging Real-Life Scenarios that Create Entry Points for Differentiated Learners and Facilitate Equity and Intrigue in the Mathematics Classroom. And Compellingly Generate Rich Student Discourse Around Multiple Solutions, can’t forget about that.

That claim is not fine; that seems misleading or even dishonest to me, as if the MVP word problems have some secret sauce or innate superiority to them. I just don’t think they do.

Judge for yourself, I’ve paraphrased 25 MVP problems below: “real-world scenario” or “pretty contrived”? And if by chance it is a “real-world scenario”, would you describe the math problem as particularly unique to MVP or more like standard math textbook fare?

Particularly engaging or more ho-hum?

I believe we could open a number of different math textbooks (remember those, the things with example problems and explanations in them) and hand the word problems in them to individual students or small groups to solve, with a much better outcome on both procedural fluency and conceptual representation than MVP.

Because even if there is no longer direct teaching, there will at least be clear written explanations and worked examples and answers in the back of the book for every other problem, all very standard basic things that are lost in the MVP curriculum, in exchange for (this claim of) Engaging Real-Life Scenario Problem Solving. And now presenting...

25 MVP “Real-World Scenarios”, paraphrased for space/time reasons:

1. Scott is doing pushups to get in shape and every single day he does exactly 2 more than the day before.
2. A chain email is sent to 8 people and each of those 8 people sends it to exactly 10 others.
3. A candy machine gives out 7 candies per quarter; it holds 15 pounds; each pound is 180 candies.
   
4. Augustus is a child who won’t do his homework so his parents give him 10 candies the first day he does it, 20 on the second day, 30 on the third day, and so on.
5. Scott takes up running and runs 1 mile the first week, with plans to double the amount he runs every week.
6. Vanessa has $60 to spend on rides at the state fair, and each ride costs $4.
7. My little sister has a piggy bank that starts with 5 pennies, and exactly 3 pennies are added every day.
8. There are 5 gallons of water in a pool and it fills at a rate of exactly 2 gallons every minute
9. In the Library of Congress, books are larger than average, so each box holds on average 6 books. How many books are in 6, 10, or n boxes?
10. The population of a town is decreasing exactly 1.5% every year.
11. Joe sells vacuums and makes $500 each month plus $20 commission for each vacuum he sells.
    
12. A parking garage charges $3 for the first two hours and $2 for each hour after that.
13. Chandler rides her bike about 12 miles per hour. How many miles will Chandler travel in 30 minutes?
14. Travis and his friends have seen their teacher creating two-column proofs, so they decide to do the same.
15. Tehani is studying a quadrilateral and wonders if she can prove that two particular triangles in it are congruent.
16. Tehani and Tia are playing a guessing game where one person describes some features of a quadrilateral, and the other person guesses whether it is a square, rectangle, or rhombus.
17. Mason explains to Mia why he thinks conjecture 1 is true using the diagram below.
18. Malik’s family is redoing their back yard and draws a map of their plans onto a cartesian graph.
19. Zac is designing a gazebo and starts by inscribing a hexagon into a circle. At a later point, Zac decides to inscribe an octagon instead.
20. An 8 inch round pie is divided into 5 equal slices, a 9 inch round pie into 6 equal slices, and 2 rectangular pies divided into 2-by-4 inch and 3-by-3.25 inch rectangular pieces. Which piece of pie is the largest and which is the smallest and how do you know?
21. Madison is designing a garden with concentric circles and paths that look like spikes, per the design below.
22. Benji, Chau, and Kassandra are building three sand castles, each one twice as big as the previous one.
23. Benji, Chau, and Kassandra are using a triangular prism base in their sand castles and want to calculate the volume of them.
    
24. Carlos, Carlita, and Zac are playing a geometry game where they each try to form the largest triangle by connecting points A and B to a point of their choosing on segment MN, called point C. and last but not least,
25. A zombie invasion is wiping out the population. The number of people are diminishing fast. Each day that goes by 48% of the living population is lost.

Editors comment: This article originally appeared as a Facebook post. I wanted to share Hava's finding because I agree that the MVP word problems are no more "real world" than any other made up math word problem! Again, our leadership has drank the Koolaid on how much better MVP is for "real world" problem solving. But it's not. -- Blain Dillard