Posted on 05/15/2015 9:41:09 AM PDT by SoConPubbie
Sample questions guaranteed to make your brain hurt in all the wrong places.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative is widely denounced for imposing confusing, unhelpful experimental teaching methods. Following these methods, some have created problems that lack essential information or make no sense whatsoever.
Some 45 states and the District of Columbia have so far adopted Common Core standards, leaving students all around the United States to puzzle over mysterious logic and language devised in accordance with Common Core’s new methods.
Here are eleven Common Core–compliant problems that have caused parents, students, and even teachers to scratch their heads or respond in outrage:
1. Starting with an easily solvable problem, New York takes the simple “7+7″ and complicates it with something called “number bonds.”
2. Not willing to ruin addition alone, educators take aim at subtraction as well, forcing students to make visual representations of numbers in columns.
3. This third-grade Common Core-compliant question asks students to match the shaded geometrical figures with their corresponding fractions. Problem is the figures aren’t shaded.
4. The first question on this first-grade math test, found by the Washington Post, makes one wonder how coins relate to cups.
5. From the same test, numbers 7 and 8 unnecessarily complicate simple arithmetic with odd, quadrilateral diagrams.
6. This question apparently eschews the use of rulers.
7. This “cheat sheet” provided to parents at an Atlanta elementary school provides definitions for some of Common Core’s Newspeak vocabulary, which throws out stuffily precise language like “add” and “subtract.” Under the obsolete math paradigm, students were bored by “word problems,” but in the new era they are challenged by “math situations.” And where a pre-enlightenment teacher might advise students to “borrow” a number when performing an equation, today’s kids are trained to “take a ten and regroup it as ten ones.”
8. Students now learn to visually show “doubles plus one . . .”
9. Apparently, “1” is a very blue number.
10. Last up: A math problem that isn’t a problem at all. In fact, the answer is stated at the very beginning.
— Alec Torres is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been amended since its initial posting.
WOW! Is this intended to just frustrate children?
Get YOUR children out of the government indoctrination centers - NOW!!
Old math created all the technology the world has. No reason at all to make it "new".
Certain things in life need to be put to rest early and thoroughly.
Math tables are one of those things. A couple of weeks of work and you are good to go.
Exactly. I think lots of people, including myself, who become proficient in arithmetic, “do it in our head” using these constructs. It’s the fastest way to do it, but not if you’re doing it on paper. They’ve got this back asswards.
I got impatient with the pause and hit send twice. Oops.
Depending upon the grade level, I don't find most of these to be terrible problems. The visualizations will help in the long run, and the "simple" problems that we understand were once very complicated. The whole idea of "carry the one" or "borrowing" has to be explained initially, for example. I remember similar things like this from early grades, just as I remember grouping numbers in long lists of addends by finding tens among the numbers (with no mention of the Commutative or Associative Properties).
Where I see the greatest problem is testing. I sometimes have to teach 2 or 3 methods to solve something because a) there are sometimes multiple approaches and b) some approaches make more sense to some students than others. When I give a test, I don't care which approach they use. Math is very forgiving -- if you mess up the procedure but are correct in your calculations, you may take the long way (or even a short cut) but you'll still get the right answer. I don't like when students are tested and told to use one particular approach -- especially if they've come to rely on a different one.
The one exception to that is vocabulary. I won't ask them to define words (except maybe trig functions, so they know which is which), but I expect them to recognize the words if they see them.
As for the question without shading -- either someone made a student clerical mistake somewhere, which isn't a problem of Common Core in itself, or the shading was so light that it didn't show up on a photocopy (which would be another clerical error).
Never thought I'd defend Common Core, but if we make bad arguments, people will use them as straw men to knock down while ignoring real problems with it.
“but not if you’re doing it on paper. They’ve got this back asswards.”
Exactly! I only use it for in my head math. However, this might be the way to teach kids how to do it????????? The other examples were goofy!
And there you have it. Separate parents from children and teach children to depend on the State instead of their know-nothing parents.
here are some of Huckabee's "clear" statements supporting ('came out swinging') Common Core:
Huckabee, however, has a history of supporting Common Core. As late as August of 2014 he called on conservatives to “stop the fight” over Common Core and, instead, consider the positive effects the nationalized standards might have on students in poorly performing schools.
In June of 2013, Sunshine State News reported that Huckabee “came out swinging…in defense of Common Core Standards in education,” and “sent a letter to lawmakers in Oklahoma, urging them to support Common Core.”
“It’s disturbing to me there have been criticisms of these standards directed by other conservatives including the RNC,” Huckabee wrote to the lawmakers. “The truth of the matter is, these criticisms are short-sighted.”
And yet, Huck's spokesperson has the audacity to say this now ....
Now that he’s a candidate for President, there will be countless efforts to try and misrepresent the Governor’s clearly stated and well-documented position against Common Core. This is just simply another one of those election year lies.
Governor Huckabee believes education is a family function, not a federal function – period. Anyone who says otherwise is either misinformed or not telling the truth.
Huckabee is pissing on the GOP base and telling them it's raining. Don't believe him.
If it takes a chicken and a half, a day and a half, to lay an egg and a half, how long does it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick the warts off a dill pickle.
This stuff is a disaster for our kids, but was happening well before common core. Our local schools had switched to “everyday math” 5 years ago. It is exactly this idiotic dumbing down of schools.
To ERASE God and the Age of Reason (US Constitution) the little children have to be conditioned to believe “snow is black” (Fichte for “happy slavery”. (1810)
The Socialist Humanist, John Dewey, the “Father” of Modern Education was the “start” of the destruction of American “education” and the elimination of Classical Education (Socratic Method and Aristotelian Logic) and CC is the final nail in that coffin. Mathematics was the last area of “Logic” that the Marxists hadn’t completely destroyed (until now).
JS Mill stated that any government control of “schools” will never educatie but only make slaves for the State. (He was correct on that point). We need LOCAL control of ALL schools by parents ONLY. All curricula created or controlled by parents ONLY. (Homeschool and tutors like Teddy Roosevelt or Lincoln had, is superior to group thing institutions until teenage years. Learning from the Great Books is essential.
Wisdom is being able to discern between Good and Evil. (Cicero) and the public schools blur the lines or FLIP Good and Evil in the minds of little children to destroy Virtue formation (to collapse culture).
Note one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 20th century— Witgenstein: “Limit Language, limit concepts”. Marxists control ALL perceptions allowed by the masses and get total control of major information outlets since JP Morgan bought all the APs in early 1900s and greater control over the “ideas” your children were fed (lies and misinformation to control “thinking”(emotions).
What the Leftists have been doing for 100 years incrementally-—is destroying (removing) all the Greatest Ideas, most brilliant books, so that our children are only capable of “thinking” as tribal people, incapable of conceiving of the concept of Iron, much less the wheel. Why? The elites know that the easiest, safest way to control the masses , is make them dependent and ignorant, so they are easily controlled and managed by their bread and circuses.
Addiction is their methodology—so the brain is literally shut down, and the development of intellectuals like a Hayek is impossible. Virtue is destroyed in children by the sexualization and “instant gratification”—operant conditioning” with computer screens/video games (Sex Ed is a Lukacs invention to destroy innocence needed for sexual identity formation and Virtue).
Without Virtue, civil society collapses and tyranny results always. Destroy Virtue formation in children (all public schools and TV watching does this) and remove children from real life experiences (work) and put them in artificial environments (to learn—ha ha) and you have the Brave New World brain exhibited by the movie: The Giver.
Walker has a similar problem due to early support for common core.
I've seen a lot of attacks on the common core math standards and frankly Huckabee is being generous calling the attackers "shortsighted". Stupid and unlearned would be better. Usually the critizers are putting up a math problem they don't understand that's designed to teach a technique they don't understand.
In most cases it's not the standards themselves that are the problem. Most of the standards are just what has been taught for decades. They've just been codified into a national standard that puts the Feds in control and Fed control is bad.
The criticisms that seem to be valid include the following:
We've always had to keep a close eye on the materials that get used, and we'll continue to have to do that. But the Fed involvement needs to end.
You jumped threads on me.
This thread is a good example. The very first question in the main article is a problem designed to teach advanced addition principles.
Sure the problem 7+7 should have been learned and probably was learned by memory in the basic addition table. But knowing that you can split an operand and then use the associative property to make the math easier, is important. I use that all the time dealing with much larger numbers.
I’m in the top 1% of the nation in math. But that is a really basic arithmetic principles that should be taught probably in the 2nd or third grade. It worries me when people who can’t even understand the importance of what is being taught in that example are trying to weigh in on the direction of our education.
Those times tables would be put into our heads so much .
Today they don’t even teach it, they want the parents to teach times tables, alphabet, and handwriting.
Not only Walker but Jindal did the same thing too.
Initially common core was a state led initiative by the governors. And it had a lot of support. But then the Fed's got involved. And now it's toxic as it should be.
All you've shown is that Huckabee can change positions when he should.
Whatever happened to the stolen goods found in Trayvon’s locker. Were they returned? Hey, don’t let me forget as to how Lucky Zimmerman is doing!
Trayvon had found those goods and was trying to find their rightful owners so he could return them before he was gunned down in cold blood by the renegade hooligan Zimmerman, who continues to life the life of Reilly in his gated mansion. Just another example of Hispanic/White privilege.
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