Posted on 11/01/2014 5:44:42 PM PDT by grundle
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Jennifer Craig stared at her daughter’s fifth-grade math homework. It was a three-digit multiplication problem, and it seemed simple enough. But her 10-year-old was supposed to solve it by drawing a chart, breaking apart numbers, multiplying, adding and maybe more.
“I’m lost,” said Craig, a 31-year-old stay at home mother of three.
And that’s how she found herself in her daughter’s classroom Monday night, sitting alongside other parents in child-size chairs and listening as teacher Alyshia Thomas explained new math strategies.
Most U.S. public school students are learning math very differently than their parents did, due to Common Core State Standards, national K-12 math and reading benchmarks that have been adopted by 43 states and the District of Columbia.
The changes have confused many parents — particularly at the elementary level — leaving them flustered by a basic parental duty: Helping with homework.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
From the article:
"In the real world, simplification is favored over complication."
Exactly.
Do test scores show that Common Core works?
One room school houses (where older kids helped to teach the younger kids (and reinforced their knowledge)) worked out swell as long as the kids continued on with their edumacation.
I’ve recently seen kids use their cell phones and ask Google a question and the answer appears on the phone screen!!
Five of the 29 members of the Common Core Validation Committee (including the only mathematics expert) refused to sign a report attesting that the standards are research-based, rigorous and internationally benchmarked. The report was released with 24 signatures and included no mention that five committee members refused to sign it...
...No member of the Validation Committee had a doctorate in English literature or language and only one held a doctorate in math. He was one of only three members with extensive experience writing standards. Two of the three refused to sign off on the standards.
http://pioneerinstitute.org/featured/common-core-english-and-math-standards-not-properly-validated/
It’s “educators” with no real world experience trying to teach advanced thinking they don’t really understand to those unprepared to grasp it.
Reading is the same way. Phonics will get 80-90% of the kids reading as well as anyone could wish. But educators decided that Phonics was bad. So they went to "Whole Language" and other awful stuff. Now, perhaps 40% of the kids read well. Great Success!!
I blame PhD researchers and textbook manufacturers. In the sciences new things are being discovered and the frontiers of knowledge are constantly pushed forwards. Various other departments in colleges want the same respect and chances for grant funding. Now you don't get either from publishing papers which say "Yes, what we knew before is still accurate." So unless you have some vast new store of knowledge (like newly discovered historic records or even hooking people up to MRIs to see learning in process), you have to burn all previous knowledge and go in a new direction pretending that your method is better.
Similarly, textbook writers and publishers don't get paid big money to take a previous version and print highlights in blue instead of red or to change references to Johnny having three video cassettes to three DVDs. You have to take what is old and worked and throw it out.
This is not a case of standing on the shoulders of giants. Instead you are at most standing on the ankles of giants.
I blew up at my son’s teacher when she counted a multiplication problem wrong that had the right answer but not the Common Core method. She said we had to show the reasoning and the multi-step method. I said 58x58 written traditionally did show the answer, and got the right one.
She implied we were bad at math, hence we didn’t get it. I explained that as two engineers, with a husband who tutored others in algebra, Calculus and thermodynamics, if we didn’t get the third grade math, the problem was the technique, not the parents.
http://toprightnews.com/?p=5609
Parents around here are getting petitions to get the garbage out of the schools.
None of us are as dumb as all of us. Go to school to get dumber so you to can pretend to know common core.
the whole purpose is the same as the “new math” in the 60s.
It it make it so that parents can’t help the students.
Didn’t we go through this new math back in the 70s? it was a disaster then too.
The districts that sign on to Common Core get BIG MONEY for doing so. The books are tripe, the math is ridiculous. The parents are furious. The kids are confused. Teach your kid math the old-fashioned way - math is logical, it has to make sense.
CC - the other subjects? I have seen English papers, Middle School. They are tripe. One side has some STUPID ‘story’ in the very worst sense of the word. They are poorly written, the kind you’d find in some 3rd-rate kids’ magazine; they make a writer cringe for the sheer banality of language. There are maybe 12 questions on the other side - 3 answers for each night’s homework. They are on that cheap newsprint that Kindergartners scribble on - not attractive, no artwork.
As Stealth Tutor, I speak my mind every chance I get - and I always warn the parents.
I had a laugh, though, the other day. I ran into a friend - an ‘educator’ at a fancy Learning Disability school here in town - who told me, “I go around to the different schools in the area, teaching them how to implement CC.” (She doesn’t do math, tho - they are not math people at her school!). “I remember your priest!! He told me he was not interested - “Isn’t CC just Obama’s way of cramming his agenda down kids’ throats? We are not going to do it.”
She was stunned! I said, “That is why we go to that church. You will not find me disagreeing with him.” end of conversation.
ClearCase - You nailed it. Math doesn’t change. It is a tool, must be memorized so kids can DO it. But no - the kids whined that it wasn’t relevant. The textbook people sell expensive textbooks that keep changing. The math professors write new textbooks to get money.
When we homeschooled, we used basic math (paperback) workbooks. It’s all there. Memorize, learn to calculate precisely, you are done. Read great books, sound out the words you do not know - bingo, you are educated.
Teachers’ unions?
This is hilarious. Keep playing the rigged game, dopes. My homeschooled kids will be ordering your kids around in a few years due simply to your “trying to make the system work.”
Those are the kids who were afterschooled by their parents. These are the kids whose parents bought Hooked on Phonics, Reader Rabbit, and Headsprout.
Yep! The 40% who are afterschooled.
But.....After all the work done by the parents and child** IN THE HOME*** guess who takes the credit?
Drum roll!.....THE SCHOOL! Yes!
Who then capitalizes in the school's high test scores? Answer: Real Estate Agents!
( Yes, I am shouting.)
Is there any way you can get your child out of this school? Is it a government school?
I remember back in the sixties or early seventies when one of my younger sisters was asking me about helping her solve a math problem. She had been learning the "new math" and using something called "base 10" or something I couldn't understand. I asked why she just didn't multiply or divide the way I had learned i.e. the old way. She said she had to use "base 10" or whatever.
My sister actually had the smartest math brain of all my siblings, so she did well in the class. But I wonder about other students whose brains were muddled by the newfangled methods.
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