Get the answer wrong, but get part of the calculation correct means you get partial credit. They are just making the stupid kids stupider.
While it seems ridiculous to do this with a simple problem like 7x5, it’s teaching techniques that can be used on much bigger numbers.
This is teaching the “distributive” property of mathematics.
Hopefully they already know 7x5 = 35.
If you can’t determine 7 x 5 simply based on the times table, how can you know that the products of 21 and 14 are produced by 7 x 3 and 7 x 2?
So, they make you multiply 7 by 3, but you can’t just multiply 7 by 5?
That’s f’d up.
At dinner the other evening our 14 year old grandson expressed his frustration with his 9th grade math teacher. She couldn’t even solve the linear equation she was attempting to teach her class. “How can I learn anything if she doesn’t know what she is doing?”
Fortunately his grandfather is a math whiz, though I doubt the solution will resemble the common core solution.
Memorization and the use of the old domino cards seemed to work very well in the 50s-60s and before that time. Then again, teaching phonics and sentence diagramming in grade school also worked very well.
The lazy, lamebrain part of my generation who didn’t bother to learn the basics and are now administrators, education experts, and senior teachers made up these techniques because they did such a crap job with their students who are now teachers.
It’s a demonstration of the distributive property. It might be more useful with larger numbers after the students have memorized the times tables.
Does it occur to folks that the left is
INTENTIONALLY
trying to take the logic out of math and education in general?
Also, a side effect is that the parent absolutely CANNOT be involved in working with their kids on doing homework that involves these convoluted illogical processes.
ALSO INTENTIONAL.
What the hell happened to memorizing the “times tables”?
How ridiculous! They should be taught the traditional method - to multiply 1/5 by 1/7 and then take the reciprocal.
How do they think that America, in just 200 years or so, came from using the crude tools of their ancestors to putting a man on the moon?
Teach children that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable potential and rights, arouse their enthusiasm for learning, their curiosity and thirst for knowledge, teach them to read, write, and do basic arithmetic, then stand back and watch them achieve!!
That's what teachers did across the wilderness of America for its first 100 years.
For children, the true "common core" of their educational experience should be focused on teaching them of their value as individuals and the principles for preserving their Creator-endowed rights to "pursue happiness."
The following is excerpted from an essay entitled, Will the Great American Experiment Succeed?":
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people...said John Adams. And Thomas Jefferson declared: "Whenever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government...The boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them."
Early generations of Americans were taught the principles upon which their nation had developed its Constitution. The Founders believed that the real security for liberty would be a people who could understand those ideas which are necessary to preserve liberty and who could perceive approaching threats to their freedom. For that reason, a primary purpose of the schools was to teach boys and girls to read and write so that they could study the ideas of freedom. A popular textbook for children was entitled "Catechism on the Constitution." Written by Arthur J. Stansbury and published in 1828, it contained questions and answers on the principles of the American political system.
Tocqueville's Democracy In America , written in the 1830's, described America's aggressive process of universal education on the Constitution and the political process:
"It cannot be doubted that in the United States the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of the democratic republic; and such must always be the case, I believe, where the in struction which enlightens the understanding is not separated from the moral education ...." The American citizen, he said, "..will inform you what his rights are and by what means he exercises them .. In the United States, politics are the end and aim of education ... every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is taught, moreover, the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution .... it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon .... It is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought cir culates in the midst of these deserts [wilderness]. I do not think that so much intellectual activity exists in the most enlightened and populous districts of France."
All the people on this thread are clearly “math deniers”.
Common core is settled arithmetic.
/s
What idiot created this “common core” craziness? They ought be flogged, tar and feathered, and put into a stock for all to throw rotten tomatoes at.
Math is one of those things that the commie-libs have had a difficult time hiding the fact that math deals with right and wrong answers and any attempt to change that is noticed right away.
You can goof with English, social studies and history, but math can not be secretly fudged.
BOOKMARK
Holy crap!...We were just told to memorized this!
Holy crap!...We just memorize this!
A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.
Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.
As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”
In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifths. “I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.”
In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint. “It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.” Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact that they will never hear one. “To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn’t care less about how important music is in today’s world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable— every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.”
Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy dream. “Of course!” he reassures himself, “No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!”
And
Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soulcrushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.
Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.” The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong. The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right.