Posted on 06/17/2018 6:25:25 PM PDT by BobL
(snip)
Eight years after California adopted new standards designed to boost students’ critical thinking and analytical skills, it’s become clear that a critical group was left behind in the push to implement Common Core: parents.
The good old days of memorizing math formulas or multiplication tables are gone. Instead, Common Core math requires students to show how they reason their way to the right answer. As a result, many parents say homework is far more complicated than it used to be. For example, the right answer to 3×5 isn’t just 15 anymore, as one popular social media post noted. It’s 3+3+3+3+3. And it’s 5+5+5. The new methods leave many parents baffled.
“I despise common core math,” says Katie O’Donnell, a pediatric respiratory therapist who lives in San Jose and often uses math at work. Though she loves volunteering in her son Nima’s class, she admits she sometimes ducks out early because she’s embarrassed that she has no explanations for students who ask for help.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Truthfully, separatism is probably the only answer. Think Amish, or traditional Orthodox Jews. The dominant culture can never be OUR culture. The alternative is restoring the culture by force. Not many takers for that.
But then, since all work is to be done in groups, if the group answer is 17 then it is considered a correct answer. Just hope they don’t grow up to be surgeons, pilots, etc.
“Couldn’t agree more. I have two engineering degrees and when I was helping my granddaughter I couldn’t figure out what they were asking...The language is Orwellian.”
But they’re they ‘experts’, so who are we to ‘second guess’?
Thankfully, in my case, I was exposed to Thomas Sowell during college, so I knew EXACTLY what Big Education had in store for my kids, before I was even married.
Obviously, they were NEVER exposed to any of this crap, and obviously they’re doing great ‘competing’ against the kids who were forced through this nightmare.
Teaching children well does not gain you any money.
Coming up with a whole new method for teaching a subject, even though the old method did very well?
Accolades, government grants, and the esteem of your peers!
Exactly, BobL. I tutor 1:1 and I always tell my parents, ‘Make sure your kids learn to do math the way you do it.” I ask the students, ‘Does your teacher explain this well?” “No, they are looking at the Teachers’ Manual half the time.” And it is designed to separate kids/ parents, I do agree.
“Having some spunk which I like to think she got from the old man, she confronted her teacher and asked if this was true. When he sheepishly admitted it was, she said he had lied to her!”
Gutsy move! Sadly we can’t win that way, though.
From the shop keeper to the carpenter to the PhD Physicist or Aerospace engineer there are exactly two problems:
1. How to translate a real world problem into mathematical expressions.
2. How to go through the process of solving those expressions, be it integrating something or adding a column of numbers. No one wants to get hung up on thinking about thinking. They just want an answer. Therefore having rote procedures [e.g. learning your gozintas] is just fine.
There is another realm - that of the abstract mathematician trying to develop new mathematical concepts. You are born with this facility and you know it by age 7 or something and unless you are a Riemann or a Gauss or a Newton or a Leibniz, forget it. Those folks weren't taught mathematics. They invented it out of their heads.
I guarantee you, at the elite prep schools, they teach kids real math. Associative, Commutative, distributive, etc. This is not an accidental mistake.
It is Orwellian, exactly. The parents near where I tutor are LIVID, marched on the school and demanded better math. I believe a lot of the math teachers now ‘use’ the texts (ie, ‘do NOT use’) and ‘supplement’ with their own worksheets.
“Teacher admits he helped write Common Core to end white privilege.”
EXACTLY I didn’t want too far in that direction, but that does underlie everything.
To put it another way, the people who run our schools HATE OUR GUTS for being who we are...
...do we REALLY think those same people will do what’s needed to help our kids excel in their schools? Are we really THAT DUMB to believe it?
This eliminates all inherited sociological advantage and makes the kids equal at the bottom stratum.
It starts all the kids in the State of California at the level of a poorly nurtured child of uneducated parents in Bakersfield, and makes sure that none of them can pull ahead of their peers.
Don't you get it? This is Social Justice.
The goal of math is to get the right answer as efficiently as possible. Common Core math makes that impossible.
I know kids that still enjoy math, but only because they were taught to get the right answer by their parents and only do it the Common Core way on the test to pass.
The goal is to make logical boys go crazy.
Agree completely on all fronts!
Bravo, post of the day!
I doubt IRS auditors, bank managers, bookies and others use common core.
I invented my own ways of doing arithmetic in as a kid. In their example, I knew that 293 was seven less than 300, so I subtracted 300 from 263 then added back seven. I would get answers faster than kids doing it the “right” way in columns, but got in trouble because I couldn’t “show my work”. I never did “get” algebra though, but the truth is 99% of folks never need more than simple arithmetic in real life.
Interestingly decades later my son got in trouble because he scored the highest they had seen on his AP math final, but had no work to show. They accused him of somehow getting a copy and cheating, though he told them he did it in his head. They agreed to let him take another test and he scored even higher, getting profuse apologies and a science scholarship.
“This is not an accidental mistake.”
Obviously, but what is disappointing is the number of people, even here, who STILL give these animals the benefit of the doubt.
Until we can get past thinking: “they’re so misguided, if only they would try to understand what they’re doing, then all would be well” and realize, instead, that this is all INTENTIONAL, by design.
...until we can all synch up and fight them, as we fought Hillary, for example, we’re simply ON OUR OWN with our kids, as we’ll stay divided here (on education), and Government Schools will continue as they are, damaging millions of kids every year.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.