Posted on 05/15/2015 9:41:09 AM PDT by SoConPubbie
Sample questions guaranteed to make your brain hurt in all the wrong places.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative is widely denounced for imposing confusing, unhelpful experimental teaching methods. Following these methods, some have created problems that lack essential information or make no sense whatsoever.
Some 45 states and the District of Columbia have so far adopted Common Core standards, leaving students all around the United States to puzzle over mysterious logic and language devised in accordance with Common Core’s new methods.
Here are eleven Common Core–compliant problems that have caused parents, students, and even teachers to scratch their heads or respond in outrage:
1. Starting with an easily solvable problem, New York takes the simple “7+7″ and complicates it with something called “number bonds.”
2. Not willing to ruin addition alone, educators take aim at subtraction as well, forcing students to make visual representations of numbers in columns.
3. This third-grade Common Core-compliant question asks students to match the shaded geometrical figures with their corresponding fractions. Problem is the figures aren’t shaded.
4. The first question on this first-grade math test, found by the Washington Post, makes one wonder how coins relate to cups.
5. From the same test, numbers 7 and 8 unnecessarily complicate simple arithmetic with odd, quadrilateral diagrams.
6. This question apparently eschews the use of rulers.
7. This “cheat sheet” provided to parents at an Atlanta elementary school provides definitions for some of Common Core’s Newspeak vocabulary, which throws out stuffily precise language like “add” and “subtract.” Under the obsolete math paradigm, students were bored by “word problems,” but in the new era they are challenged by “math situations.” And where a pre-enlightenment teacher might advise students to “borrow” a number when performing an equation, today’s kids are trained to “take a ten and regroup it as ten ones.”
8. Students now learn to visually show “doubles plus one . . .”
9. Apparently, “1” is a very blue number.
10. Last up: A math problem that isn’t a problem at all. In fact, the answer is stated at the very beginning.
— Alec Torres is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been amended since its initial posting.
I’ve just gone through some of this with my 11 year old 5th grade niece. What they need is a solid command of adding/ subtracting, multiplying, dividing. What they are getting is mind teasers that aren’t consistent for use in real world situations. And, if you don’t have college educated tutors, those kids are completely lost.
Poor kids.
When will they go back to basics?
“Faiza”?
“Roberto”?
LOL! I feel like that cat reading the example problems.
For ten thousand years man has been taught math the ‘old’ way, and it has served him well.
Now, idiots who can’t find a job in the real world are giving lessons in how to destroy a child’s mind......................
“I use the methods in the first two examples all the time to do math in my head.”
So do I. In fact I was teaching them to Little Flash A last night. But I don’t call them “number bondage”.
bkmk
SAXON MATH TO ALIGN WITH COMMON CORE STANDARDS
This is from 2013, so they may have dropped that idea. We'll know more when we go to buy my son's homeschool books for the next year.
Don't know why the author thinks this is a Common Core thing. It's at least 60 years old. Here's Tom Lehrer from the 50s with New Math.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wHDn8LDks8
The answer is “D.” If he’d killed enough he would have won.
King Harold killed how many Normans?
OK, people, that's it -- Kenny Bunk has won the internet today.
Trayvon was an aspiring rap artist. He was just turning his life around. He didn't drop out of the school, the school failed HIM.
Did I hit all the lib talking points?
bimp
Well, unfortunately Saxon Math has to accommodate enough to make sure students get high scores on college entrance exams. I trust them with it, though.
You will forever be happy you went with Saxon Math. I think it is wonderful.
Well, unfortunately Saxon Math has to accommodate enough to make sure students get high scores on college entrance exams. I trust them with it, though.
You will forever be happy you went with Saxon Math. I think it is wonderful.
Buy the old books online. YOu can get them all. and their companions
Geez, no wonder this country is a disaster in technical fields, kids are being taught by math-phobes.
You have to wonder what idiots came up with this. Also they let and encourage students use calculators in class.
When I was in school back in the 1960’s we had the new Math that was just as bad, this is worse.
Bump.
And, one wonders why, without the cash register reading, young clerks can’t make change.
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