Posted on 06/30/2014 3:31:19 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
GREENWELL SPRINGS, La. — Rebekah and Kevin Nelams moved to their modest brick home in this suburb of Baton Rouge seven years ago because it has one of the top-performing public school districts in the state. But starting this fall, Ms. Nelams plans to home-school the couple’s four elementary-age children.
The main reason: the methods that are being used for teaching math under the Common Core, a set of academic standards adopted by more than 40 states.
Ms. Nelams said she did not recognize the approaches her children, ages 7 to 10, were being asked to use on math work sheets. They were frustrated by the pictures, dots and sheer number of steps needed to solve some problems. Her husband, who is a pipe designer for petroleum products at an engineering firm, once had to watch a YouTube video before he could help their fifth-grade son with his division homework.
“They say this is rigorous because it teaches them higher thinking,” Ms. Nelams said. “But it just looks tedious.”
Across the country, parents who once conceded that their homework expertise petered out by high school trigonometry are now feeling helpless when confronted with first-grade work sheets. Stoked by viral postings online that ridicule math homework in which students are asked to critique a phantom child’s thinking or engage in numerous steps, along with mockery from comedians including Louis C. K. and Stephen Colbert, these parents are adding to an increasingly fierce political debate about whether the Common Core is another way in which Washington is taking over people’s lives.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Sounds like a boon for the manufacturers and sales agents of graphing (expensive) calculators. Gonna turn this exonomy around on the backs of our kids!
I would have flunked 3rd grade for using the methods on that worksheet. Counting on your fingers was a strict no no.
Imagine, if you will, a restaurant that most children had to go to for the majority of their meals...Now imagine that it was run by the government.
Kids gonna' love the food?
Their should be thousands of different schools across the nation just as there are restaurants.
Education is far too important to be left to government for obvious reasons.
Technically, being able to count implies one is able to memorize as counting requires knowledge of ordinality.
1. 25X10 Don’t they teach the kids that when you multiply by 10 just add a zero to the back end of the number ???
Thus 25 becomes 250 and youre finished ...
2. 6X4 or 6X? While people are suggesting that not all the cars might be a four wheeler has anyone considered that many of those cars will also have a spare wheel ???
3. 30X2 or 30X? My first thought also. What if Johnny looks around at his friend Gus who lost a leg during that last suicide bombing at the local mall by (the people who must not be mentioned) and wonders if he should count Gus’ missing leg or not ??? Should he ask the teacher to clarify ??? Or would that be racist ???
3. sorry that should have been 30/2 or 30/? or something I don’t have a division symbol key..
I’m assuming that all the kids have excellent reading & comprehension skills to start with.
By 3rd grade we had mastered “mental Arithmetic”
and we also didn’t count on our fingers..
there was no time
the teacher was on to the next question...
There are 44 ways to add two numbers together and all of them are correct. There are 38 ways to subtract, and again all of them obtain the same answer.
Some of the methods are easy and obvious, and others are not so intuitive, but do get the job done.
I don’t know much about common core, but from others I’ve talked to, it seems they have picked the most ambiguous methods for our children to learn.
LOL...naa, actually nearly all the complaints about the curriculum used with Common Core deal with crap that’s been out there for DECADES prior to Common Core (like Everyday Math)...and those curriculums (as I call them) DEMANDED calculators from an early age, sometimes in Kindergarten. So nothing new here.
The difference is that now we have a HUGE RED TARGET to shoot at - we can blame all the crap, in all the curriculums, on Common Core and make the liberals scurry around like a bunch of cockroaches after turning the light on.
÷ to get:
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Reference found here.
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Gut the Gibesmedat Gang ☭ |  |
| I, for one, welcome our new Cybernetic Overlords /. | ||
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Ah Sherlock’s brother....
More a friend of Adam Selene.
It’s the process they make them go through that’s grueling - g-forbid they should memorize the times tables.
Instead, they make them group and count - multiplication is supposed to be an easy way to find out how many, rather than counting each one.
Neither are these kids. That's the problem. The common core is trying so hard to teach the kids the why behind the how and some kids just aren't ready to wrap their brains around the why, although they're perfectly capable of the how. Teach them the how, i.e. have them memorize their math facts and then worry about the word problems.
Kids are supposed to do those problems with pictures. Draw four lines for each car and count up the total. It's a stupid waste of time.
schools have de-emphasized memorization for many years. Learning multiplication tables disappeared from the class room long ago. However, IMO memorizing the tables sure helps in your life ahead.
LOL. That’s funny.
It’s another way to separate kids from their parents and make them dependent on their government school teachers. Mom and Dad can’t help them. Makes parents look stupid.
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