Why parents struggle with Common Core math: “The diagrams are absolutely insane.”

San Jose Mercury News ^ | June 17, 2018 | Karen D'Souza

[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)

[100American]

I am well familiar with the Edutocracy and their inability to actually teach let alone provide and real world uses of the material that might engage the mind of the student

In the Education world or referring to it people say “those who cannot do, teach”

Further it is an established fact that the lowest 20% of graduates go into teaching

Nuff said

[pepsionice]

I would suggest this...once these kids start to hit college-level math courses, and are told that they need a pre-college course (maybe even two)...which have no pay-back for their degree, they will begin to question what really happened in high school.

I read a piece where a parent spent the past year trying to help their kid in some junior high school math class. The class-work being brought home was hand-out material from the teacher. The parent eventually went to some PhD math friend who examined the take-home work, and they just started laughing. The word projects and diagram requirements were not designed by someone with advanced math capability. It was marginal material and should have been thrown out.

I might go and suggest that the people ‘selling’ Common Core...just weren’t prepared for the delivery of the idea.

[Big Red Badger]

Bakersfield...
Right.

[lightman]

Social justice is perceived by too many as NEVER allowing one head of wheat to rise above the rest of the field.

[BobL]

“I would suggest this...once these kids start to hit college-level math courses, and are told that they need a pre-college course (maybe even two)...which have no pay-back for their degree, they will begin to question what really happened in high school.”

They certainly should. They have a high school diploma, which requires a level of math needed to start college...and they get to college TOTALLY UNPREPARED.

Still don’t see any evidence people are putting this together, though.

[marktwain]

In their example, I knew that 293 was seven less than 300, so I subtracted 300 from 263 then added back seven.

---

Yes, I did stuff like that as well.

Isaac Asimov wrote a whole book about those sort of tricks.

https://www.amazon.com/Quick-easy-math-Isaac-Asimov/dp/B0006BLVLA#customerReviews

[pinkandgreenmom]

If anyone wants to “afterschool” their children/grandchildren in math the old fashioned way, I highly recommend Rod & Staff Math. It is a Menonite pubication that teaches real arithmatic. I taught my kids the first grade book in pre-k and Kindergarten and then went on from there.

[4Liberty]

+1

[stevem]

I have worked with my grand kids on modern math. I don't know if it's "common core." I do know it makes no sense.

If it is common core, it needs to be cast into the sea.

I could never teach my grand kids trig or calculus. I could teach them what they need to know to communicate with humans in our world.

The nonsense they have brought home would not allow them to survive in the 21st century.

[Garth Tater]

"They abandon any technique which clearly works, and they force people to use any technique which doesn’t work. They aren’t trying to produce well-educated kids."

That's the plan. Been the plan for a long time.

“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education, fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen — of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
                                  – John D Rockefeller

[Fred Hayek]

I learned math the old way and could solve most simple arithmetic calve in seconds. But now according to the academic nitwits I probably don’t know math because I don’t know what funny diagram dance to do.
BTW, I’m a degreed engineer that aced differential equations.

[Hugin]

Interesting. I was thinking about buying a copy for my grandson, then I saw the 500 dollar price tag. I don’t need math to know that’s too big a number for me.

And obviously I misstated the number in my solution, and left out part of my work. ;~)

[BobL]

“If anyone wants to “afterschool” their children/grandchildren in math the old fashioned way, I highly recommend Rod & Staff Math.”

Yep, I took the afterschooling route too, using Saxon Math in my case. You have to have the correct mindset for it though, and understand that at least through grade school, if not through middle school, the ONLY subjects ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for kids to learn are reading and math, and thus prioritize them over everything else (including after school sports, for example, or piano, or even history or science). If you have time left over after teaching reading and math, then you can move on to other stuff (like sports or piano), but you have to prioritize.

(and no, don’t believe Big Piano, playing piano doesn’t help a kid learn math - being taught math properly and doing problems is how kids learn math)

[Nifster]

I dislike common core for any number of reasons

That said common core are a set of standards not the metjodoligy. The stupid PhD in math who decided that elementary school should be able to do anything more than memorize tables and utilize them is insane. Concrete thinking doesn’t even begin until age ten or so Abstract thinking (draw a conclusion) doesn’t happen until even later. Asking young brains to do what they neurological can not is just plain stupid

And I thought the new math they taught us in the sixties was bad

[fruser1]

An entire generation of retards, coming up.

If I’m in good enough shape, I might just take over the country.

[texas booster]

A lesson I learned young is that there is arithmetic and there are maths.

I became really, really good at arithmetic and OK on maths.

When I was young I could see numbers as colors - which did nothing but raise an occasional eyebrow among teachers at military schools around the world.

But back in the US at public schools I was the really, really odd kid.

Makes me wonder how things could have been ...

[BobL]

https://archive.org/stream/QuickAndEasyMath-English-IsaacAsimov/asimov-quick-maths#page/n7/mode/2up

Hit the gray button in the upper center to download.

You owe me a beer.

[seawolf101]

[freeandfreezing]

You are correct. If you live anywhere near a Russian School of Mathematics send your kids there - starting as young as possible. It will drive Mueller crazy and by the time your kid is in High School they'll be math experts. And when they take the SAT an 800 in math is not out of the question.

That opens a lot of doors at the college level.

[Myrddin]

Phonics worked well for me. I rarely have problems with words in English, German or Welsh. French has different rules harmonizing adjacent consonants and vowels. Turkish add "vowel harmony". Scots Gaelic and Irish have some very complex constructs. Even Japanese written in katakana/hiragana is easy phonetically. Once you pull in Kanji, I'm over my head.

The Common Core math is just stupidly complex. I'm perfectly happy doing all manner of math. Arithmetic, algebra, differentials, integrals, eigenvalue decompositions. Trigonometric identities are critical in solving integral equations. The Common Core approach is aimed at making simple arithmetic look daunting.