[DallasBiff]

What is so hard contemplating, 1+1=2?

[muir_redwoods]

Every chance I get I sing the praises of my high school teacher Gerry Gazeau. He taught me “Gerry Gazeau’s Famous Test for Reasonableness”.

It gives like this,

If you’re trying to figure 11.0431% of $289.36 stop. Look and see that that’s about ten percent of three hundred dollars or thirty bucks. If you get an answer that’s not about thirty bucks, start over.

He also used the following explanation of orders of magnitude.

A thousand seconds is a coffee break
A million seconds is a vacation
A billion seconds is a career
A trillion seconds is about 315 centuries

Using that model and looking at our national debt as if it were seconds, it amounts to about 10,000 centuries.

[Retrofitted]

Take a number line showing the values 1 through 15. Make a point showing the value "7". Except you can't use a point, you have to use a box. And just because you can't see the box doesn't mean the box isn't there. Now, add 3 to 7 and show it on the number line using a box to show the value.

Ta-dah! That's the new math my son got when he was in the second grade. Yes, that was his introduction to using number lines.

[systemjim]

***Here’s the scoop on the new approach to teaching math***
___________________________
Hint: It doesn’t work!!

[Mr.Unique]

Common Core gets the kids (and teachers) more wrapped up in the process than the result.

In math, the result matters most, almost to the exclusion of the process.

[KarlInOhio]

One of the problems with the common core techniques is that they take some of the methods those who are really good at math use and teach them as techniques to those not very at math assuming that will make them good. It doesn't work that way. If you don't have the basics, the shortcuts will just lead to confusion.

Additionally, those who are intuitive at math are constantly doing math. If I see two numbers I'm going to add them, multiply them, divide them, look for common factors or something like that. I just can't help it. I know people who are artistic and they will leave a trail of notebook pages with little sketches from when they get a minute or two of boredom. Writers will start putting things into words. But I would never dream of trying to get an average student to do the same.

One other problem is the constant need to publish books. The old methods cannot be allowed to stand because if they are schools might not buy new text book series, but rather just keep the old books until they fall apart. Some topics need to be updated, but probably not nearly as fast as the publishers would like. New things are discovered in science and anything with computers is pretty out of date by the time it hits paper anymore. But math at the elementary and high school level really hasn't changed much in decades. High school geometry could be (and largely is if you brush off the paint job to hide the fact) taught from Euclid's elements.