My advice, although virtually no one bothers following it: Teach your kids reading and math PROPERLY (i.e., traditional math and phonics), and get them 2 years ahead and keep them 2 years ahead. Then, when your kids are told in school, for example, to 'diagram' 3x5, they will already know the answer and with that information they can play the Common Core game with their teacher and probably get the problem 'right'.
Of course the best advice is to simply get your kids out of the public schools...but then what the hell do I know about it?
Ping (squared)
“Karen D’Souza” — any relation to Dinesh, of Obama’s “Common Core” sentencing (and recently pardoned by President Trump)?
Math teaches children logic. Obviously they are trying to fix that mistake.
“Of course the best advice is to simply get your kids out of the public schools”
Yup. Thank you Mom and Dad for my private academy education. Besides, all the chicks from other schools in the district liked us because of the jacket and tie uni.
I am no fan of Common Core.
There are many educational approaches to various topics. It’s common for people to say “One method doesn’t work for everyone.” Which is true.
When it came to reading, for many years people taught phonics. It’s a very methodical approach, based on sounds and letter combinations, and various rules about ending some words with an “e” or whatnot depending on whether a word has a long vowel or a short vowel.
The Liberals seemed to have hated phonics. Lots of rules. Very tedious. And, hey, it worked for a lot of people, but it didn’t work for everyone. So — phonics got pushed out of the schools. It was often replaced by Whole Language, which I consider a nightmare.
But, back to math:
Common Core suffers from everything that Phonics suffered from: “Lots of rules. Very tedious. And, hey, it works for a lot of people, but it doesn’t work for everyone.” Abd even worse: it’s somewhat nonsensical. Most people hate it and just think it’s stupid. But they’ve made the darn thing mandatory. One size doesn’t fit all?? Shut up and learn to like it because Common Core is going to shoved down your throats.
Education is a very damaged field. 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. They are trying to produce problem kids and thereby justify larger school budgets.
End government schools. They are evil.
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.
My granddaughter is a math whiz, and she became a teacher. When she was a tiny child, she came home with her math homework. She was stuck on multiplication and division. So, I showed her that multiplication is just a shortcut to addition, and division a shortcut to subtraction.
I used simple examples such as the one in the op. In that one sitting, she grasped the concepts and ran with them. She caught on so fast she was ahead of her class.
By the time 4th grade rolled around, she was teaching herself intermediate algebra from my college text books. She understood that book better than I did.
Some of the common core math is ridiculously complicated unless you already have good basics.
Different people have differenSome learning styles, and that goes for kids, too.
Teacher admits he helped write Common Core to end white privilege
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ8Nr3_2724
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.