Posted on 10/25/2015 3:53:05 PM PDT by grundle
Here's a "repeated addition" Common Core problem that's taught in third grade in US schools:
Use the repeated-addition strategy to solve: 5x3
If you answer the question with "5+5+5=15,” you would be wrong.
The correct answer is "3+3+3+3+3.”
Mathematically, both are correct. But under Common Core, you're supposed to read "5x3" as "five groups of three." So "three groups of five" is wrong.
According to Common Core defenders, this method will be useful when students do more advanced math. This way of reading things, for instance, can be used when students learn matrices in multivariable calculus in high school.
But parents aren't happy about it.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Well, if anyone’s going to know what’s going to work and what’s not, it would be the teachers. All we can do is hope and pray they are on the right side, and not pushing the leftist playbook.
Gosh I better get my kids back in public school. I have been teaching them all wrong.
I remember learning the multiplication tables in elementary school. We memorized the easy ones, then I wondered why they didn’t go farther than they did, and I pushed it. All I can say is if you can do math in your head—you’ve got it made...
I remember learning the multiplication tables in elementary school. We memorized the easy ones, then I wondered why they didn’t go farther than they did, and I pushed it. All I can say is if you can do math in your head—you’ve got it made...
Correct! Calculus is not about arithmetic or even algebra.
It's about differentiation and integration of functions, related rates and other matters. It uses algebra, trig and arithmetic to accomplish those goals.
But then the English department would have to teach the definition of "commutative," which has too many syllables. Also, they would then have to teach "associative" and "distributive," too.
The last one would be particularly difficult after spending so much time explaining "redistribute."
-PJ
Down with the commutative law!
I’ve got a boy in 3rd grade. The biggest problem is inconsistency in the worksheets. We’ll get a series with problems like;
Use the repeated-addition strategy to solve: 5x3 = “3+3+3+3+3.”
then we’ll get,
5 x 3 = 3 x 5
It’s very confusing for the kids.
I wonder how the Core Crowd expects kids to answer the problem:
397.293 X 29.987 = ?
How long will it take to write down 29.987 397 times plus figuring out what is .293 of 29.987, then add them all together using Common Core addition?
Further, 5X3 is in the multiplication tables so the answer should be found immediately thru having memorized the tables, not addition.
Life is not series of simple multiplications, rather life is full of $1.99 & $29.95 transactions. Common Core is impractical in real word situations. One shouldn’t need paper/pencil to figure out how much money you need to buy 5 bags of ice @ $1.25 each.
Common Core math hits a dead end as soon as a simple decimal point is added or large numbers are involved.
The result will be kids, later adults, who can’t do the simplest of math problems. I suppose the aim is to make the people too stupid to know they are poor & oppressed.
Kinda reminds me of how the slave owners didn’t educate their slaves.
For me matrices were first introduced as methods of calculating currents and voltages in linear electric circuits. Later on we got many more use out of them. But it was in the university.
And as far as I can remember, matrix multiplication is the only time when a × b ≠ b × a.
The operator of multiplication can be defined in many ways. There is the matrix product; there is the Hadamard product; there is the Kronecker product; there is the Frobenius product. It would be not particularly wise to "prepare" students for operations with matrices. When they get that far they will be able to explain for themselves why this or that method is used, and what's the difference.
The whole story is sad. Math is famous for many ways to prove something. Here is the page with 114 different proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. According to those "teachers," 113 of them would be "wrong" - and I'm suspecting that few of them would be able to comprehend some of those proofs.
Have you seen kids try to figure out the change you should get back? Forget multiplication, simple addition and subtraction is beyond their comprehension. But they can text a novel in 4.2 seconds.
I am not sure what the point is of the common core nonsense. Maybe it is that they want to teach students to think of numbers in terms on their parts. That is not entirely a bad thing. But the approach does not really accomplish that. The value of teaching math to young students is that they have a strong ability to memorize and remember. The ability to dissect and understand comes later. So all they are doing is confusing kids and wasting the key advantage of learning these things at their age.
I am not saying they cannot dissect and understand math. But it will come in big concepts and usually not be an ability of all. For the masses, memorization and routine is the road to success. Some talented kids might on their own think math in terms of its dissected parts. It is a stupid place to start with ALL young kids. Even if you start there, you should never start there in the common core idiotic way. There are much more logical ways to approach it.
But that scenario has a hole in it. If the goal of Common Whore is to produce more Democrats, and if it works, they won't be TAKING multivariable or any other kind of Calcoolus.
They'll either be on the "Math: Learn to make change, English: Recite 'would you like fries with that?'" track, or the "Math be invented by waycisss dead white opressors to keep da man down!" track.
That’s what I liked about math and why I took so much of it. It’s non-political, unlike soft stuff. It doesn’t matter if you don’t suck up to the teacher. Your answer is either objectively right or it’s objectively wrong. No politics and no brown-nosing involved.
“Common Core isn’tt about teaching the students knowledge. Its about teaching them how to think the way they are told to think by a higher authority without question. It is a method of programming minds to follow orders. In short, its brainwashing.”
I think you nailed it.
Utter nonsense!
“All I can say is if you can do math in your head—you’ve got it made...”
I agree. I always loved math and it has helped me tremendously throughout life. So many young adults these days can’t do simple math without a calculator. It’s sad.
Funny isn’t it, back then here in Ga. the democrats
would always campaign with “More spending on Education”
and the schools continued to get worse every year.
In the middle sixties my younger brother could hardly
read and write but graduated from high school!
“This way of reading things, for instance, can be used when students learn matrices in multivariable calculus in high school.”
Excellent. And the 90% of students that will never need to use multivariable calculus in their lives will be completely screwed. They’re morons to even think this kind of thinking in 3rd grade would even help later in life. By the time your mind is capable of understanding calculus, you’ll simply have deduced all of this common core nonsense yourself.
Education in this country needs a revolutionary overhaul. They need to ditch this entire ridiculous system where kids jump from grade to grade working towards release from the institution at age 18 using Federal guidelines.
They’ve got to quit pushing this mantra where people need to go to college unless they want to live a life as a loser. I did the BS and MSEE thing myself ... I liked some of it, hated most of it. I would have preferred to simply start working in my field right after high school and probably could have done so had I had the proper training as a kid.
They need to come to grips with the fact that some kids learn things by reading books ... others learn only when they do the things they read about. Some can learn by doing both. There is no such things as a “one size fits all” approach to education after age 12.
They need to insure that all kids are competent in reading, writing, and arithmetic by age 12 ... right around the time hormones start to kick and puberty makes them all mental cases. From there, you need to determine what interests these kids and build a curriculum around these interests. School choice would be a blessing in this regard as a single public entity couldn’t handle all of these varying options.
The need to teach literature only to kids that have an interest in it. In the past reading and writing skills were cultivated by examining topics in science, history, geography, etc.
These days, some mediocre book with a political agenda is taught as a “masterpiece”. Many kids fall asleep reading such garbage and couldn’t write a paper about said trash if their lives depended on it. Who in the hell really cares how many “works of art” kids have read prior to graduation if they are forced to think a certain way about it.
I was thrown out of English class calling John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” “Welfare Wagons West!” back in the early 1990s. I found the book to be a horrible bore. It’s not that I didn’t care about people suffering during the dust bowl and Great Depression ... I just couldn’t stand the story. I would have been better served reading more about science and technology and having my writing / comprehension skills evaluated based on my ramblings about those topics.
I could go on and on about this for hours, but I know damn well why the Federales and dim-wit liberals want to force this garbage down our kid’s throats. The sickening twits won’t even confess that most private schools thier precious children attend won’t touch this trash with a 10 foot pole.
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