He did say he'd rather do word problems than "ordinary, boring computation."
How do I get this kid to love math? Is it laziness? He's not a lazy kid so I don't think that's it exactly. But I'm hard-pressed to know what it is.
Okay-- well, application problems sound like a reasonable compromise. Can you combine that with a 'test-out' strategy-- that is, you identify areas where YOU think he needs some work on skills, and if he 'pretests' out at some agreed-upon accuracy, he doesn't need to do anything more, and if he doesn't, then you'll work on those more challenging "word" problems instead?
You
can purchase workbooks of those problems alone, you know. Also, many math textbooks have them at the back of the regular problem sets.
My DD is like this, too. She'll far, FAR more willingly work 2 or 3 thirty minute problems than 25 drill-and-kill easy ones that should only take her 30 minutes total.
It's just that her brain doesn't 'turn on' for that little reward. I guess her brain considers it to be like warming up the Maserati for a run to the end of the driveway for the newspaper. Why bother, right?
