Infinitely close to zero of course
Ignorant people who think Common Core is some nonsense That Muslim came up with, most likely.
Even though the fictional story is clearly set before Common Core or Obama.
As stated above there was no test. The story is pure BS from first to last. The man is an idiot without even the capacity to invent a believable story.
Well … he probably has a daughter.
My bullshit detector went off before I got four paragraphs in. I do not believe any grown adult with an IQ above a potato would believe it.
The scary part is reading the comments to his blog. I’d say 3/4 of the readers believed it absolutely.
Which is just like my Facebook. I see ten posts a day of urban legends, phony quotes, and various other things I can debunk with twenty seconds on Snopes. In many cases they are not just false, but really obviously false. I can understand not knowing that George Carlin didn’t say such and such - unless you’re familiar with the man and his work that’s an easy miss - but some things are just patently absurd, and yet people believe them.
People believe what they want to believe if it’s anecdotal and does not require them to actually do anything. It’s like a brain can hold these little surface stories that don’t affect anything of consequence you actually do and aren’t subject to critical analysis.
That’s one of the things I started filtering out. I don’t get much anymore. I don’t know how easy it is to set up anymore, though. It’s definitely different than when I could just “take a survey” to tell Facebook the types of posts I preferred.
Clearly and unambiguously false. The principal is a poorly-written villain, the author is a treacly protagonist, the math is shaky, his understanding of common core is absent, the structure of the test is laughable, the villainous organization is nonexistent.
Okay, my anecdotes.
- In teaching my third graders how to subtract three-digit numbers (yes, it’s a second grade skill, some of these kids come back from summer vacation barely remembering their own names), we look at a problem like 614-387, and some kids will answer 373, having subtracted the smaller digit from the larger in each place value. So I talk with them. “Look at 4-7. You can’t take seven away from four, try it with your fingers. So you go to the tens place and—” at which point often some bright kid will interrupt and say, “4-7 equals negative three.”
So I gotta explain that, yes, they’re correct, if you’re dealing with integers, but right now we’re working only with whole numbers, and that’s awesome that they know that, but goddammit this is hard enough for their classmates to wrap their brains around, stick with me for the moment. Then I’ll go to them later to show them how they can use their knowledge of negative numbers to solve subtraction in a different way, of course, because it’s pretty cool that they know about negative numbers. But when you’re trying to get everyone to a basic understanding, sometimes an advanced understanding overwhelms the struggling students.
As to the question of whether I ever got in trouble for correcting a teacher, sorta.
Third grade, we were supposed to do a report on an animal in Africa. I chose termites, because of their awesome mounds. My teacher refused to let me do it, because termites aren’t animals. There may have been some outraged argument happening on the part of the eight-year-old in the situation, but I didn’t actually get in any trouble; I just had to do chimpanzees instead.
Seventh grade, we read some book that involved sharecropping, and we had a quiz in which one of the four questions was to define sharecropping. I gave a definition more complete than what the teacher had in mind and was counted wrong for my answer, changing my grade from a 100 to a 75. I showed her the dictionary; I showed her the previous historical novel I’d read about sharecropping; my mom called her to talk with her. The grade stayed unchanged.
Not that I hold grudges or anything against those two terrible human beings, mind you :). But I keep them in mind as cautionary tales when my own students correct me on something.
Heh. As an aside, that song has an ironic second purpose. Watch this video of it to see that the “New Math” complained about in 1965 is what most of us are familiar with; the way he describes “traditional” subtraction being taught will look wholly foreign to most of us. The old kind of subtraction appears in the video starting around 0:34.