[Jeff Chandler]

exposing kids to math concepts before they are ready to understand them

Breaking the primary rule for teaching math: Math skill is progressive. You must learn foundational concepts before progressing to the next concept, like placing one row of bricks on top of the other.

The other issue, memorization of tedious but ubiquitous -- and vital -- core elements such as times tables enables automaticity.

There are some parts of Common Core math which might be of benefit to a student who is going to major in math, but for the other 99.9% of the class, standard shortcuts such as long division are far more useful.

[Jeff Chandler]

You must learn foundational concepts before progressing to the next concept

Correction:

You must learn master each foundational concept before progressing to the next concept

[hanamizu]

“There are some parts of Common Core math which might be of benefit to a student who is going to major in math...”

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That, in my opinion, has been the major problem with math education even before common core. Math teachers are pretty much self-selected to be people who like and are good at math. They naturally found the patterns that govern how math works as kids and were bored and discouraged by memorization and drills. They want to teach math how they learned it, by exploration and discovering patterns on their own.

But they fail to see that the vast majority of humans aren’t good at math, don’t see the beauty of it and only want/need math to solve the kinds of problems that math can solve. Math teachers want to teach math as they wish they had been taught rather than how the subject needs to be taught for most people.