Again (and I think you’ve gotten this, but just in case), Common Core isn’t a new way of teaching math.
As pointed out above, I think, textbook publishers and the like are probably who you want to blame. The introduction of new standards means an opportunity to sell new materials. Those new materials should look sufficiently different if you want people / districts / textbook buyers to think they are different.
Because the textbooks that already existed weren’t written for the standards and didn’t meet the standards, and the big textbook manufacturers didn’t have the capability to redesign the textbooks in the time frame and for the amount of money New York was willing to pay. So these companies came along, produced crappy material like the stuff your daughter has, and gave it to New York and the other states for cheap. Since the states had to have material that met the new standards, and needed it right now, they figured “Eh, this is good enough”, and took the stuff.
My aunt, the one that’s been teaching for something like 25 years was around when No Child Left Behind came to be. She had her qualms with it, but I don’t think she had any huge issues. She HATES, Common Core. When she (and my other teacher relatives) talk about all the paperwork, it all seems to be about CC. My aunt is the only one that even mentions NCLB, but possible/probably because she was teaching before it came to be.
I may be mixing it up with something else, but I thought one of her beefs with that was that she could no longer hold a kid back for more than two years. She was, at the time, teaching at very, very bad school (as in, in a terrible neighborhood, she had a gun pulled on her, she’s been punched, spit on etc), she was basically just a babysitter for these kids. On the one hand, she didn’t like the idea that the kids could move up through the grades once they’d been held back twice, OTOH, she sometimes didn’t mind them not being her problem after a while, she was getting sick of seeing kids 3 or 4 or 5 years older than the grade they were in. Finally getting rid of that 15 year old 7th grader can be a relief. NCLB seems to offer free tutoring after a while, but I can’t tell if you get a ‘free pass’ to the next grade as well.
But don’t quote me on that, it was a long time ago that I heard about it.
Then either:
A)Commoncore/greatminds (the people writing the books) took the liberty of rewriting how math is taught in a way that makes it (in this math major’s opinion) very difficult to learn
or
B)Common Core/Core Standards are written in such a way that math must be taught this ‘new’ way.
Half the people are blaming Common Core, half the people are saying ‘no no no, it’s just a set of standards’. If it’s just a set of standards ISTM the entire way kids learn math shouldn’t have to be redesigned. Just reuse the old ways of teaching and revamp the curriculum to make it work. If it’s not possible without using this new system, then it IS CC’s fault.
Like I said earlier, the system is messed up, I don’t care who’s fault it is, maybe our anger is misdirected (maybe it’s not), but something needs to be fixed. Talk to other parents of current 6-10 year olds and I’ll bet you’ll find many agree. Talk to teachers and see how many of them say ‘it’s just a set of standards, it’s fine’ or more likely ‘Ugh/paperwork/testing/I don’t even get some of it’. Something needs to change.
I’m trying to come up with a similar example with reading/English, since I know that ‘clicks’ for more people, but I’m struggling. Just imagine that when your kid came home with her English homework you couldn’t help because it didn’t make any sense at all. Maybe they took adjectives, verbs, nouns, subjects, sentence diagrams etc and tossed them out the window and replaced them all with numbers and shapes and some new thing that just said ‘please make a Word Window for each sentence with the proper numbers and shapes’* and all you could do is sit there and say "I don’t know honey, I’ll email the teacher and if she doesn’t get back to me in the next few hours I’ll come in with you in the morning to let her know that we couldn’t do it because we don’t understand it’ while she’s sitting there in tears because she’s worried about not getting her homework done.
*All totally made up, but this is how I feel when I see my kids math homework. I look at it and think 'make a what? What’s a tape diagram? What’s a place value disk? What’s a math sentence?"
BTW, “math sentence”…as it was used, they really just substituted it for the word ‘equation’. Why not just teach her the proper word. I mean, they gave her very simple word problem and then said ‘write the math sentence?’ Why not ‘write the equation’.
This debate has been on-going ever since the very first New Math 1.0 hit the streets back in the late 1960’s or so. It was circa 1963 that Tom Lehrer famously told us:
(Listen here, with animated video along with.)
This snippet probably tells us all we need to know: The teachers are now given 0% control over what they teach and how they teach, down to the veriest micro-managed detail. It’s all driven by politics, textbook salesmen, and school administrative levels who get sold on the new stuff by the salesmen, none of whom actually know shit. You know the old rule: Them as can, do. Them as can’t, teach. And them as can’t teach, teach P.E. And them as can’t teach P.E. become the administrators who micro-manage what gets taught and how, down to the last, uh, dot. Your daughter’s teacher probably got her ass kicked up to her shoulder blades for teaching that.
I would remind you of Feynman’s chapter “Judging Books By Their Cover” in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, in which he describes his mis-adventures sitting on a textbook evaluation committee. (Hint: He wasn’t invited to sit on the committee again the following year.)
I also commend to the attention of everyone concerned, the book Why Johnny Can’t Add: The Failure of the New Math by Morris Kline. This appears to be the full text on-line here. ETA: Note that this book isn’t anything recent – It was published in 1974.
You might recall the story of The Pineapple And The Hare that assploded on the Internet a few years ago – an idiotic story about a foot race between a pineapple and a hare, followed by some even more idiotic reading comprehension questions – that was used on (you guessed it) a New York State English exam.
(Note that the link provides two versions of the story, the first of which was somehow butchered almost beyond recognition. Scroll down for the second version, which apparently was the one actually used on the test. Even this version was re-written by the educational-materials company that created the test. Even the original author of the original original story (which you can probably find on-line with a bit of effort) couldn’t make much sense of it.) Also, this link shows only two of the questions, which caused the most confusion. I think you can find all the other questions around somewhere too. Hang tight, I’ll do a bit more looking around for it . . .
Okay, here’s a link to an article about The Pineapple And The Hare that, in addition to some discussion, appears to include the entire story (as included in the test, which was not the way Daniel Pinkwater originally wrote it), including all of the stupid questions:
More ETA: Thread about an incomprehensible CC question about triangular snowflakes. In Post #2, Amateur Barbarian writes:
The way kids learn math did not have to be redesigned, and was not in fact redesigned. The stuff you are talking about, e.g., is the same stuff the schools around me were peddling in the late '90s, and parts of it date to my own school days two decades earlier. It was the fashionable or at least faddish way to teach math in some of the education schools.
What happened is that the schools needed (or thought they needed) new curriculums specifically tied to the Common Core standards. They had multiple possibilities to choose from, but for many districts this was the fashionable choice. Once the curriculum managers in school administrations picked this set of workbooks, teachers guides, test batteries, etc., this became the ‘approved’ method in that district’s schools.
In other words, this district had the option of real textbooks pretty much like they’d always had, teaching in pretty much the same ways, or going with a “free” and fashionable system that happened to be very different. Guess which they chose? Now repeat across hundreds or thousands of districts.
Differing methods of teaching math aren’t even generational any more. When I was a senior in high school I was a tutor in a community program and the 3rd & 4th grade kids couldn’t understand my explanations of math because they weren’t being taught things like “carrying” or “borrowing” and didn’t have textbooks so I could look up what those things had been renamed. (I did eventually find out.)
By the time I was a senior in college, my best friend was student teaching in a grade school and reported that those processes had entirely different names, just four years later. And in 22 years of teaching, she’s seen them change again, and are different in the district where she teaches (middle school math!) and the neighboring district where she lives and her own kids attend.
Nothing in pedagogy is permanent or universal. Common Core is at least trying to fix the second part of that problem.
Because part of the standard is to ensure that kids understand the why of math. We were taught things like multiplication tables and expected just to memorize them, and maybe got visual examples (counting block were my favorite). Today kids are expected to be able to explain why 9x5 and 5x9 are the same thing not just know that they are. That means that there has to be a way of teaching them how to understand that.
What’s a Venn diagram? What’s a multiplication table? What’s a carry?
I bet things are commonly taught in stupid and ineffective ways now; that’s usually the case. But the fact that there are diagrams, tools, and concepts with names opaque to those not explicitly taught about them does not bother me; that was the case way back when, too. You’re just already familiar with the terms and methods you were taught, and unfamiliar with ones you haven’t been taught. That’s not strong evidence for one approach being pedagogically better than the other.
It is unfortunate that you feel disconnected from the ability to help your children with their homework, even with material you understand well, because the approach with which they are being taught is different than the one with which you are familiar. (And ideally, homework would be structured in such a way as that it didn’t matter so much that one conform to a particular notational/algorithmic framework in displaying one’s mastery of the fundamental concept, though in practice, I know that ideal is rarely met). But it would be foolish to say we should never try anything new in our approaches to teaching old subjects for fear of alienating the parents. These new approaches are being adopted because, right or wrong, there is a belief that they will in fact help children understand the concepts better. If you think that is wrong, explain why the methods you are accustomed to display better conceptual understanding.
Ah, but I realize we are in GQ, not GD, so this is not the place for any of that discussion, really…
Ah, but this thread has long since sojourned well into GD territory by now.
The problems resulting in the wake of Common Core have more to do with long-term issues which still aren’t being addressed, including incompetent administrators who are more concerned with covering their ass than with learning, a shameless and greedy publishing industry that preys on them, and woefully insufficient teacher training. The more teacher funding gets cut, the less experience we have in the classrooms. And there are a lot of teachers who have acquired a lot of experience, and a certain degree of success, by simply doing the same thing over and over again. They’re the “survivalists.” They don’t even think in terms of standards; they just have found something that works, and they keep repeating it. These are the ones who don’t do well when anything changes, whether they receive good materials or bad.
Common Core’s objectives won’t be met if these other things aren’t changed. Mechanical teachers don’t become more thoughtful with Common Core–their inadequacies just become all the more clear when they get bad materials.
And anyone else I missed that’s basically saying ‘sorry buddy, this is your fault’, I have a question. Do any of you, right now, today, have an elementary aged child? Not “I used to”, not “I’m going to”, not “they were doing something similar when I was in school”, do you, right now, have a kid that’s somewhere between 1st and 8th grade? If you don’t, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You know what you hear, you know what you’re repeating, but you’re not actually going though it. I’m sorry, but that’s the case.
I challenge you all to go talk to parents (ya know, like me) of current elementary aged kids in common core schools and ask them how they like the math program. See what they say. I think you’ll find I’m not alone here. I think you’ll find very few of them are thrilled with the math program. Talk to the teachers (as I do on a very regular basis when I pick up my kid) and I think you’ll hear the same thing.
You can tell me/them about how it’s just a set of standards. But this set of standards came with a new way of teaching. You can tell me/them that teaching styles change over the years, but we don’t understand this new way of teaching and it appears to be slowing our kids down.
At this point the thread seems to be going around in circles. I feels like it’s me against all of you. I don’t feel like some of you are hearing what I’m saying and I don’t think you guys are actually experiencing what I’m going through so you (lets be realistic) don’t actually know what you’re talking about. There’s a reason people have to upload angry youtube rants and post unreadable checks. It’s the only way to start these discussions.
I can’t be the only one with a 2nd or 3rd or 4th grader that sick of looking at dots. Sick of making sure the dots are in the right configuration or grouped together correctly for this problem or, wait, this problem we use numbers with rectangles around them, I think, and on this one we use dots with circles around them. Some of this crap is asinine. I get it, teaching changes, but the current method is awful.
tumbledown, you mentioned that kids are now learning why 9x5=5x9 except you’ll note in my example earlier (with the inverse(?) arrays) that’s exactly what they aren’t learning. That’s what WE were taught. We were taught it to make doing the math in our head easier and faster. It’s what I teach my kid (what’s easier, counting by 9’s or 5’s, it’s the same), but when she writes it on paper, if that array isn’t in the correct form, the problem is marked wrong. They haven’t talked about commutative property so they can’t use it.
I assure you, they no more can explain things then we could. They just memorize different things. We memorized multiplication tables, they memorize how to count by different numbers. My daughter could quickly count by 3’s or 6’s or 9’s or whatever to ‘multiply’ after a few months of practice. That’s how they multiply now, they count by one of the numbers they other number of times.
But it is impressive seeing a 3rd grader count by 7’s up to 100 faster than I can.
I don’t think this is true. Seems to be a “ten frame” from what I can tell.
It’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that but to hear people complain about that method of subtraction, which is the only method I learned (in the late 80s) and instinctively still do, is very strange indeed.
Eh, I have a 1st and a 3rd grader at the moment. Our school had an evening class a few years ago for parents to explain how they teach math now, I wasn’t able to attend but my wife did and she said there were lots of complaints. My kids come home with worksheets that they have to explain to me because I wasn’t there for the class to learn the terminology or the methods they’re using. Once they explain it to me it either makes perfect sense and I move on, or I feel that it’s claptrap and I move on, but at no point have I been stymied and unable to check their work.
However, I will grant you that I may be lucky in that my kids have always been able to explain it to me in sufficient detail that I can pick up what the teacher is actually looking for. If one of my kids came home with a worksheet with 20 problems on it and absolutely no instructions (which happens with some regularity), and my kid was completely lost and couldn’t recap what they had covered in class that day, I’d be stuck. And it’s not like I could just fall back on how I was taught, because it’s not always clear that they’re looking for a certain answer. Rather, they’re sometimes looking for some intermediate step that I’ve never done, or I called it a different name. If that were to ever happen, I guess I’d have to go talk to the teacher which is a big pain. Or google it. Yeah, I’d probably just google it.
That said, I don’t blame Common Core, because at that evening class I mentioned they said that they’ve been teaching math this way for over a decade. And in general I trust that my school is run by intelligent people who won’t screw up my kids. The actual number of times I’ve looked at math homework and thought, “Well that’s effin’ stupid, they shouldn’t be doing that” I can probably count on 2 fingers. Considering the general quality of the crap I had to do as a student myself, that’s pretty good. In terms of things that worry me about my kids’ development, their math curriculum is pretty low on the list.
A “ten-frame” is just an array with a fixed number of frames (ten)… it’s still an array model, where the squares are fixed, and can be noted as occupied or unoccupied (that’s what the circles in the squares are) to show numbers less than ten.
So, seriously – does the notation on the check have any meaning or not?
Here’s a blog post with a more detailed explanation (and a defense) of this method.