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 blew up at one of my child’s elementary school students when we didn’t understand the math assignment (two digit by two digit multiplication), so I showed him how to do it the traditional way and had him do it on the page that way. He got the right answers.
The teacher counted it WRONG because he didn’t use the new matrix method.
Then she dared say that the problem wasn’t the new fangled methods and new terminology (designed to make parents look stupid, boost workbook and tutoring sales and render all prior content obsolete) but that we were bad at math.
I stated that as two engineers who managed to make it through calculus three and differential equations, if we had trouble helping an eight year old with math homework, it was the curriculum, not the parents.
However, when I showed them how to Google Algebra Problems on their Smart Phones, I did make some headway. They're not all bad. They treat me quite respectfully, and many have some very artistic tattoos. On a non-Maths note: a significant number (O say 3 of 10) can even name the state capital! Many fewer have an idea of just who their Congressional Representative might be. All know everything about Kim Kardashian and delight in bringing me up to speed on that and other topics apparently vital to them.
While Algebra remains a mystery to them, it remains a mystery to me as to how this or any other serious political entity can continue to thrive when populated by people of such profound ignorance.
No, Huckabee should have never been for Common Core. Neither should Walker or Jindal - but again, it’s interesting you have the “others did it too” excuse. Huck was also far more outspoken than Jindal or Walker. FAR MORE, FAR LATER.
I thought Reverend Hucskterbee was above all that.
Just for fun, I used to like to go through the McDonalds drivethrough when they had two apple pies for a dollar; and I would ask for three. Oh boy...
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What ARE the old books?
Internet. Alibris or websites. Search the book you want. Ask for anser book and the Mental math book
LOL. I thought you meant the OLD books, not a 2001 edition. I was thinking you meant say from the 60’s or 70’s.
Saxon came out of the nineties I think. There are the new editions for school and homeschool but I think that the old editions work better.
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