86? Try 52.
“Do over” was so often written on my papers I thought it was my name.
I also corrected her spelling and showed her something pretty simple that corrected her problem....words need vowels.
They had their papers posted outside of their class....poor kids....being taught that wrong spelling is okay...cuz we don't want to hurt your feelings.
As a guy who barely touched trig in highschool. The navy got me thru calc , thermodynamics, newtonian and einstienian physics, reactor fundimentals, reactor core construction, motor and generator theory and metallurgy and a few courses I havent mentioned such as basic electricity and electronics and the steam cycle. And boiler water chemistry... all by rote memorizations.
College 1985. Math teacher said no calculators...slide rule only and told us to think in our head what the result should be...plus or minus...that turned out to be good advice.
For those who don’t know, besides not requiring memorization of things like the times tables, another major fault of common core is exposing kids to math concepts before they are ready to understand them. I’ve subbed in 2nd grade classes where the kids are given fractions to play with—before they’ve even mastered basic addition.
They are exposed to concepts for a couple or three weeks before moving on to the next. There is no mastery of anything. You end up with 8th graders most of whom have to rely on calculators to do two and three digit addition. Whatever appears on the calculator’s screen, they will put down as the answer, no matter how absurd it is.
Kids learn more from drills? You betcha!
An old chemistry professor of mine once said, “From memorization comes knowledge.”
He was 100% correct. But of course that kind of thinking is not “progressive” enough. So goodbye to another proven learning method.
A younger friend’s wife completed her (non-technical) BS degree a few years ago. I looked at the math book, there was no math in it. Just pictures and words.
You last sentence is it.
Not everyone is good at math. I won’t say that cannot be helped. Some grasp it innately, some with a little drill, some with a lot of drill, some never. Sigh. But the answer is not to concoct a convoluted alternative scheme like Common Core. I for one do not think it is a useful means of teaching slower kids, but it murders the cognitive ability of the sharper kids. For those kids who are good, being able to solve math problems yields a feeling of triumph, confidence, and with practice the feeling that you can CRUSH math problems. That of course is a microaggression and is to be discouraged. When I was young, I killed it at math; and there were few things I was good at and could CRUSH. I just think that feeling is something every kid needs to have, find, and discover within themselves, somewhere. Of course, that feeling is in itself to be crushed within the individual today.
For slower kids, yeah, you know, sometimes horrible rotten repetition and drill WILL WORK. Com Core says repetition will NEVER work. My nephew could not grasp math at all when he was a kid. Most of it was attention span. But his Dad drilled and drilled him, and today he is making astronomical jaw-dropping money working at a hedge fund.
CC is just a goofy piece of twisted, unproven gobbledygook to scramble young brains while textbook publishers can make BILLIONS. (Yes, with a “B”)
Happily his dad was a teacher in another school in the same district and when he found out about it got him transferred to another class where the teacher was actually competent.
The second teacher used drills rather then abstract explanations and lectures about the Beauty of Numbers.
Most people are not math nerds. They can do math the same way they can drive a car without knowing how to rebuild the engine.
Or read a book without knowing how to write a world class play.
Most of us hit in the middle. We can handle higher maths if it is taught to us correctly. The current curriculum does not want to do it that way. It designed to get us accustomed to having elites who can do things and the rest of us are dumb and should get used to being at the bottom.
Perhaps memorization has something to do with expanding, developing and exercising the brain so that problem solving skills follow. We also use to read voraciously, learn a second language and play musical instruments.
I spent part of a summer moonlighting coaching kids on the ACT for one of the big name tutoring companies. Found out they were essentially a fraud and never went back. But in the meantime the kids I worked with were mostly hopeless at math - couldn’t add 2 + 2 without a calculator.
If you don’t have your basic arithmetic facts embedded in your brain you cannot be good at math.