Posted on 03/11/2015 10:52:12 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The Common Core testing standards, not passed through state legislatures and forced upon schoolchildren without parental consultation or consent, are obviously a subject of much debate.
An Arkansas mom encapsulated just how brazen the manner of implementing these standards was when she confronted the Arkansas State Board of Education and questioned how well the testing was preparing kids for college.
The mother, Karen Lamoreaux, represented fellow educators and a total of 1,100 people by her count, when she spoke before the board in December 2013. She laid out a case of why the standards were so ill-conceived, and at one point elucidated just how absurd it is to teach around these tests.
At one point, she asks the board directly: Are you smarter than a fourth grader? Here is the test question she asked:
Are you smarter than a Common Core fourth grader? Let’s find out. The problem is: Mr. Yamato’s class has 18 students. If the class counts around by a number and ends with 90, what number did they count by?
After a moment, one educator familiar with the circuitous language answered ‘5’ by performing the rudimentary calculation of dividing 90 by 18.
Lamoreaux goes further by explaining just how tedious and unrealistic the ‘correct’ method of answering is under the standards:
This, however, is what the Common Core Standards expect our fourth graders to do. If they solve it in those two steps they get it marked wrong. They are expected to draw 18 circles with 90 hashmarks solving this problem in exactly 108 steps. Board members, this is not rigorous. This is not college ready. This is not preparing our children to compete in a global economy.
This is the crux of the problem. The nations that the U.S. is competing in the global economy are not preparing schoolchildren for careers in scientific and engineering fields by having them waste time drawing circles and hashes. These countries are establishing the fundamentals of mathematics, and moving pupils on to higher concepts such as those used in algebra and calculus, at age-appropriate increments.
In a NY Times article that bluntly asks, “Why do Americans stink at math?,” the main issue with such confusing methods is illustrated by a striking counter-point from a Japanese school:
Instead of having students memorize and then practice endless lists of equations — which Takahashi remembered from his own days in school — Matsuyama taught his college students to encourage passionate discussions among children so they would come to uncover math’s procedures, properties and proofs for themselves. One day, for example, the young students would derive the formula for finding the area of a rectangle; the next, they would use what they learned to do the same for parallelograms. Taught this new way, math itself seemed transformed. It was not dull misery but challenging, stimulating and even fun.
Imagine that: Children love to solve problems and mathematics is a tool among others to tackle real-world problems. Bogging kids down with tedious exercises is not improving our children’s ability to love math and science.
Until our state legislatures and local school boards, through competition and trial-and-error, are free to find ways to tap into the passion that children have to learn, we are going to continue debating the wisdom of bureaucrats and corporations imposing one-size-fits-all standards on America’s young students.
Educators and parents would do well to listen to this mom’s concerns as an outstanding starting point to find out what they think themselves about the Common Core standards. If we should do anything, it is to hold it to the same standards that we are holding our kids.
Thanks for reply DonaldC. Please note that the Supreme Court has clarified that Congress cannot lay taxes in the name of state power issues.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
And since intrastate schools are uniquely a state power issue, the federal funding that schools are drooling over with respect to accepting Common Core are arguably state revenues that the corrupt feds stole from the states through unconstitutional taxes.
So the states have the gold to run their own schools if citizens would get themselves up to speed with the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers and associated limited power to lay taxes and peacefully exercise their voting power to stop the feds from stealing state revenues with unconstitutional taxes.
And to ultimately do the job of stopping the corrupt feds from stealing state revenues right, the states need to repeal the ill-conceived 17th Amendment. Thomas Jefferson had put it this way.
"The States should be left to do whatever acts they can do as well as the General Government." --Thomas Jefferson to John Harvie, 1790.
The concept of having kids wield numbers by 10s is sound. Other curriculum is actually doing that well. The problem is the common core went off the deep end with clunky implementation until a sound theory is hopelessly ruined along with the kids math ability.
My daughter is doing something in homeschool that gets place value RIGHT. Hence she can do 4 digit addition, subtraction, fractions, and a little multiplication and division and she is not yet 6. Mastery over the ‘tens’ has unlocked numbers in a big way and there is no stopping her now.
The thing is, the ‘old’ methods of math did the same thing, they just took a more circuitous route to get there. They were not overtly basing everything on tens but kids ended up getting it. Everyone raise your hand if ‘carry the one’ is burned into your math brain.
Yeah this is strange. I wonder what type of brain they think is able to use this type of thinking at a young age. Maybe they watch movies too much and are looking for Ender Wiggin. Anyway, the math here is that the class has 18 students. If another class has 90 students, what number multiplied by 18 equals 90?
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LOL. Some years back we were helping a neighbor's kid with his multiple choice math homework. The instructions said to "ring" the answer. I asked him to show me how he "ringed" an answer and he proceeded to draw a circle around it. I guess 'circle' was too hard to spell for the teachers.
Accounting software is so smart now that people don’t need to be. /s
The education establishment has always abandoned tried and true teaching methods that work in favor of the latest fad in education. Case in point teaching reading with phonics. How many times have educators abandoned phonics in favor of endless variations of the old look say method that has always failed? I believe one cause is that EdD programs are totally lacking in real qualitative research. I started in an EdD program but left in disgust because of the ludicrous “research” methods. I wanted to do serious research on the effectiveness of online teaching technologies, but couldn’t find any of the faculty in the College of Education who had any interest in the subject or even enough technical knowledge to understand the kind of research I was proposing. Serious qualitative research would have long ago established that phonics works to teach reading and that the other methods being tried simply don’t work as well. However, that kind of research is lost on the education community.
Equal outcomes.
That’s what ‘common core” is abut.
No student is allowed to show superior intellect, and no student will be allowed to work out any answers that weren’t arrived at via the approved method that common core demands.
Common core is about making sure that, all students are prepared for a future where they are all pawns of the state.
IN a sense, a student cannot use the God-given gifts that he or she was born with. All students will have to do things in exactly the same way. Students are being turned into robots. Robots all do the same, if they’re of the same cookie-cutter design.
Thus, a student with a superior brain or with a larger and more capable memory, cannot used those God-given ‘talents’ to solve any problems. It’s all the same, or nothing, and anyone that shows initiative, is a problem child. Can’t have a problem child, who will, to a liberal mind, grow up to be a problem for the state. Memory and superior minds and intellects, are not conducive to a population that is easily controlled or subservient to government authority or rule.
Common core has to be stopped before we end up with a lot more indoctrinated people going out to a work-force and into a country that can’t take care of itself.
I am a product of the “New Math” of the early 60’s. To this day, I cannot state a multiplication fact without going through multiple steps. “Rote” memory was not good for us as we had to “think” about how we got to 6x8. Go to the nearest ten and count out the difference. Convoluted, confusing and totally unnecessary. This unfortunate stab at reinventing math to get kids interested is being repeated in my grandsons sixth grade class today. I am saddened for him and his mother as they struggle through hours of homework made harder by such ridiculousness. However, by my knowing that his math today is my math of yesteryear, I was able to help him understand the basis for their stupid math word questions. Common Core has nothing on this grandma. By the way, I am in accounting and am fully reliant on a calculator.
I think “Base 10” is fine.
But apparently they don’t think the students can grasp this without beating it in to them in a way that is completely retarded.
I’m sure that both you and I, as well as most freepers here have developed certain short cuts when dealing with both large numbers and the need to “Carry” numbers.
What this curriculum is saying is that they think kids can’t think abstractly.
That they need to teach Abstraction.
There is a huge fundamental problem with what these “educators” think about human nature.
Thanks for the sarcasm tag!
I’m constantly digging into numbers and sources to figure out why our accounting software says my staff all charged $350/hr to our customer last week. Just for example...
College-ready and competing in a globally economy have become opposite things these days
Let us not forget that its not just math, they are dumbing down every subject and miseducating the kids
Agreed, but..
It’s not as bad in communities where the parents are highly involved.
Communities where the parents not only engage their kids, but engage their school.
The powers that be, or think they be, want to replace the involved parent with the state. This is clear.
Most of the kids that have parents that are engaged in their child’s life are able to teach their kids to be objective when considering what is being fed to them.
I did.
And for any young or new parents out there, I started with TV commercials. Commercials that had a “jingle” that our kids tend to remember. I told my daughter that she needs to understand that those commercials are mostly crap, and they are designed to get people to buy their stuff. I taught her to look at them objectively, to question what they are saying, to consider everything objectively.
Maybe, I ruined her opportunity for utopia.
Many people their states do not have it when they just renamed it
Many people their states do not have it when they just renamed it
Easy for you to say.
/s
Fat fingers and fast thinking - not a good combo
Fat fingers and fast thinking - not a good combo
Well, eventually, one or the other is bound to work.
And maybe i could write a best selling novel on Twitter too.
;)
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