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 ...
Ive watched my grandchildren doing Math homework and I told them that I had no idea what they were doing and why did they make it hard on themselves...
at first I couldn’t believe “the teacher told them to do it that way and I didn’t know how to do Math”
Don’t forget the spare tire
That was my problem with the problem! The assumption of no physically challenged people in the question was disgustingly politically incorrect, lol.
Exactly
One of my kids grew up during the " New Math" debacle. What a mess . Parents couldn't help their kids, the concept was stupid and had no justification.
Adding in base eight.???
Hubby is a math major, taught it 20 yrs in Jr College, as remedial math to A/B Memphis city HS grads before they could take his electronics and computer science courses. They have so screwed up the system it no where resembles what we learned if you are over 40.
Why make a simple problem complicated? To have poorly educated people of course. I am tired of having to PRINT info because the 20 something can’t read cursive. I mastered in the 4th grade.
BINGO!
Everything a Marxofascist advocates is to corrupt the nation spiritually, culturally, and politically.
Yep! STD.
The purpose of sex ed is to destroy the child’s natural and protective modesty.
I bet the wouldn't have used the name...hm?...Lutisha.
This kind of begs the question, will some future nuclear scientist in order to answer the president’s question as to how bad the devastation will be, have to draw 741 nuclear incoming missiles before he can adequately explain it to the president?
which students are asked to critique a phantom child’s thinking
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
My bet:
1) Most of the phantom children who are wrong have “white” names.
2) The phantom children who are right have Black or Hispanic names.
Just my guess. Hopefully, someone with the means and skill will check into it.
It gets weird with some of the grouping exercises the kids do instead of just getting to the point.
What happens is that when people don't memorize things they encounter, they can't recognize when something's wrong and they can't tell when data is showing up in unexpected situations. Thus they can't draw conclusions when the unexpected occurs. They can't think.
If a teacher isn't demanding memorization of crucial data, the parent is often on their own. My experience was that a lot of teachers brought up on the bogus math look the other way when students use calculators.
And therein lies the problem.
The math part of math questions is above the math level of the students.
Hey Rose! There's a Messerschmitt in the kitchen. Clean it up, will ya.
The same kids who cannot memorize their multiplication tables seem to have a firm grasp on all the stats of their favorite sports stars.
Another idiocy: My daughter learned the standard method of multiplication. School shifts to common core and requires the matrix method.
She’s frustrated, so I tell her to do it the way she learned it before.
She gets the right answer.
Teacher gives only partial credit, because the WRONG method was used. It wasn’t the matrix method.
Im 65 and in New Zealand I had a British education..
When I started school at 5 (Primer One) I probably could already count...I know I was already reading..
We learnt “mental Arithmetic almost at once..Hey that’s having to MEMORIZE
about once a week the teacher would give us an oral quiz..
10 sums..
she would say two times three and we wrote it down and then it was on to the next problem...no time to count fingers write down the problem or anything else...we either knew the answer or we didn’t..
it was a source of pride to get all 10 answers right...and most of us did ...
We started learning the 12 times table right from the start and a chart with all 12 lots was on the wall long before we got to the end..
there is was every day to look at..
we may have been working on the 3x column but we already had experience with what the 6X etc. looked like..
so when the teacher covered the chart for a quiz the contents of the chart remained locked in our memories...
Children learn 2 ways, auditory and visual..they either learn through one of those or both...
If the children don’t have charts etc on the walls of their classrooms the info is just handed out piecemeal and they don’t get everything they need...
Later in their education they would have an occasional Math problem that does not give them enough information to form a satisfactory answer..
those problems up thread were those sort of questions...
there were viable which were not taken into consideration...
how many of those cars did have a spare ???
Did all the children have all the common amount of digits ???
Did little Mary have a broken leg and only wearing one sneaker ???
Was Jimmy in flip flops that day ???
LOL
But meanwhile how did my generation manage (and WITHOUT computers) to learn to do the times table in our heads and to accomplish other Math effortlessly, and our grandchildren with supposedly all these modern advantages cant do 2+2 without taking their sneakers off ???
The method avocates impeding the progress and potential of those who can and do memorize in order to dumb the curriculum down to the level of those who have learning disabilities . . . that kind of thinking is morally wrong and is a recipe for wrecking the foundation of this country . . . which is what they are trying to do.
I have long been an advocate of grouping by ability and performance. You cannot award self-esteem by dumbing down the curriculum so everyone succeeds. Self-esteem is acquired by legitimate progress and accomplishment. Enough leftist education garbage has been peddled by the commies who dominate that field. Time to clean house.
New way for counting on your fingers, back in the '50s and '60s when I was in school meant a whack across the hand
Couple of whacks and I learned to count with my toes .
It doesn't matter what are the stated goals for Common Core.
The reality is CC is created by rabid Statists with the singular goal of making kids obedient citizens of the State.
This will be accomplished by destroying critical thinking skills.
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