From what very little I’ve seen, you can bet good money that CC will be soon relegated to the bin of education history. Of course, the number of kids it harms may be in the millions.
My Chem student showed me her math book, and said that they get no repetition on a topic, so they can nail it down. This strikes me as exactly the kind of stupid mistake education math weenies would make, assuming that if you do something 3 times in a week, you must understand it.
Bwuh? I only heard of it in about 2003. What program are you talking about? I mean the computerized series of questions that verifies that a kids read a certain book which is evaluated to be at a certain level.
Algebraic inequalities, in some form, have been around longer than New Math. I have in my possession an excellent (IMNSHO) college algebra textbook, published in 1948 (that’s older that I am!) that has an entire chapter devoted to inequalities.
The focus is a little different, though: IIRC, it doesn’t put all that much emphasis on finding the solution set of an inequality (and in any case, the phrase “solution set” is nowhere to be seen in the book), but it does put a lot of emphasis on proving unconditional inequalities.
I studied that chapter (on my own) before taking Calculus, and that practice in proving (and understanding) unconditional inequalities was profoundly helpful in later grokking the epsilon-delta concept and in doing a few simple epsilon-delta proofs that we did.
It was released a little later and schools may or may not use it, but my point was that it definitely has nothing to do with Common Core.
After all this discussion, you apparently still don’t know what Common Core is, but you’re willing to “bet good money” on it?
Yes, it is doubtless that relegating CC to the bin would harm millions of kids. Or is that not what you meant?
So, after he lets you know you’ve insulted him, rather than apologize, you double down on the insulting language. He didn’t refuse to learn anything. That’s your deliberately antagonistic choice of phrasing. You continue to imply he’s a really bad math major and a bad parent, too stubborn to help his kid.
Guess what? If the kid is being taught that those other answers are wrong, she’s being taught badly. He shouldn’t be helping his kid learn bad stuff. It will only hurt her in the long run.
And if you need to bring this stuff home, then the teacher isn’t teaching very well. Homework is for practicing what you’ve already learned. No parent should have to teach their child how to do their homework. If parents could handle that, we wouldn’t need teachers.
And, like it or not, there is a good argument that this is all the fault of Common Core. The specific specifications are not necessarily as important as what resulted from them. It meant that schools that previously trusted their teachers to figure out textbooks now have a checklist–meaning it could be handled by people who don’t actually understand math and can’t actually teach it. It encouraged using a single system school-wide. (I went to a public fifth grade in the 1990s. Different classes had different books and different lessons, depending on what they thought would work best.)
It also gave a clear marketing target for these math startups that ultimately became synonymous with “Common Core.” You were being told that there was this huge change that would have to happen, and here there were these people saying they would handle it all for you. They flat out called themselves “Common Core,” to the point that the way in which they teach math is now synonymous with the concept.
And that’s why you guys are wrong. Words mean what people use them to mean. And people use “Common Core” to refer to this particular type of New Math. That you could still teach old math and be Common Core compliant is irrelevant, as that’s not what the term means anymore.
If Common Core just referred to what you guys claim, then everyone wouldn’t have thought “Common Core” when they saw this check.
Do you think states didn’t have standards before the Common Core?
The whole point of the Common Core is that fifty states having fifty standards boards each writing fifty wildly difference sets of standards for basic competencies is a really expensive, needlessly complicated, ridiculous way to do things. It makes it hard for kids to transfer, hard for teachers to share ideas across state lines (which they’d like to do now, with the Internet and all), and hard to actually measure what systems are succeeding and which aren’t.
There were standard before Common Core. There were smart and dumb curriculum decisions before Common Core. Teachers now have MORE choice, because they aren’t just stuck with whatever publishers thought it was financially worthwhile to publish textbooks for Wyoming’s standards.
If a given district or school took away any power to choose a curriculum, that’s a choice they made separate from the Common Core.
People think “Common Core” because of a successful campaign by the Tea Party to turn this into an insta-wedge issue.
But that’s different from having to write it down in a ten frame. You may not have your subtraction memorized, but you at least can do it mentally. You don’t need a 5x2 box in front of you. You aren’t overly reliant on a single way of visualizing the number 10.
The kid seems to have learned ten frames as an algorithm. She doesn’t seem to understand the fundamental concept of subtraction, that you have 10 and are taking 6 away from that.
And I sure as hell can come up with situations where you would want to do it faster than that–pretty much any more advanced math that uses subtraction. A calculator is slow compared to how fast you can do any single digit* subtraction. Especially if you don’t have your calculator out.
And, anyways, I find that keep track of how many times I’ve counted is difficult. You’re already keeping track of where to start and where to stop.
*In subtraction, “single digit” does not include the minuend. In general, the biggest number is not included.
What is using a ten frame but doing just that? You look at ten boxes, fill in 6, and count how many are left unfilled. (Or some such thing). What sort of display of understanding would you prefer in this case?
Note that this is more of a conceptual understanding of subtraction than simply memorizing “The correct response to ‘10 - 6’ is ‘4’. There is a big table of ‘single-digit subtractions’ and answering such a question means recalling the values in this table immediately”, which is what many lament has not been instilled.
We actually, paradoxically, have more evidence that a child who takes time to calculate 10 - 6 = “…uh, hold on, ah, it’s 4” with a ten frame understands the concept of subtraction than we would if they had immediately responded with “4, of course”! (Which is not to say that quick response is bad; I am just making an observation about the display of evidence of conceptual understanding)
“I told her I’m not going taking a remedial night school math class to get me to a 3-4th grade level.”
" The parents sure as shit shouldn’t have to relearn how to, literlly, add and subtract 1 and 2 digit numbers because we don’t know how to do it the ‘right’ way anymore."
Why would I apologize for insulting him? I did not say anything that was not both true and relevant to pointing out a better way to think. Others have tried different approaches in this thread, here was yet another. If, on seeing himself in reflection, he doubles down and uses the concept of “insult” as an excuse for shielding himself by hairflipping out of the thread, what is that to me?
He refused to learn what she was supposed to be learning in the first place. We don’t even get to the part that you’re fantasizing about in which he can discern good and bad ways to teach this method and help his daughter understand the difference.
True but not helpful to this situation (and it is often not right to put the blame on the particular teacher).
This is worse than wrong: It’s right but completely irrelevant and very derailing.
Words mean what people use them to mean. But different groups of people sometimes use the same words to mean different things. In this case, parents, teachers, and lawmakers each often mean something different by the phrase “common core.” Parents thinking common core means “newfangled methods” are going to draw conclusions about teachers and laws based on a false equivalence between these parents’ term “common core” and the other groups’ terms “common core.”
My daughter is doing excellent in school. I haven’t seen any “new math” or anything confusing to me or to her. It’s all straight forward and Common Core compliant. When I talk about Common Core, it’s a different Common Core than the “Common Core” everyone complains about. But I’m wrong? Screw that. Common Core isn’t relative. It’s defined in writing. If people point at the Constitution and say “Those are terrible Ikea instructions,” the caretakers at the National Archives don’t hang an “Ikea Instructions” placard above the display.
I agree that it would be unfortunate if people had difficulty recognizing the possibility of thinking of ten in any terms but as a particular graphical 5x2 box. I am in tremendous agreement on not being unduly fixated on a single way of thinking about almost anything in mathematics.
If a student couldn’t just as well grasp “**********” as amounting to ten, or recognize that a box of 5 rows and 2 columns is as good as one of 2 rows and 5 columns, or any such thing, there is a serious problem.
But I’m not seriously worried this issue will arise merely from students frequently standardly visualizing the number ten using a 5x2 box.
At least the connection between the number ten and
*****
*****
is mathematically natural and significant.
I frequently visualize the number eight using two approximate circles stacked on top of each other, like so: “8”. This is of no mathematically natural significance whatsoever. And it would be greatly to my detriment if I couldn’t find other ways to think about the number eight than through this arbitrary visualization. But I’ve done alright, so far.
How would you prefer the kid think about 10 - 6?
Bump!
Oh, I beg your pardon, sir!
Here’s a recent article I just spotted from Business Insider on just the subject of this thread.
The Common Core math quiz that has everyone outraged isn’t about Common Core — it’s worse.
Discusses the latest outrageous test (or homework?) question that the teacher marked wrong –
The same basic issue as discussed earlier in this thread – Find 5 x 3 by repeated addition.
Student writes 5 + 5 + 5 = 15; gets marked wrong because the teacher wanted
to see 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 15. Likewise, computing 4 x 6 by drawing an array of 6 rows and 4 columns gets marked wrong because teacher wanted to see 4 rows by 6 columns. (Somehow, one gets 24 either way, but apparently the student isn’t supposed to know that at this grade level.)
Author argues, like some posters in this and earlier threads, that despite all the rantings about Common Core, this ISN’T a Common Core issue. It’s just a really bad teaching issue, and he rants about that just like I have: The important thing to teach kids should be that multiplication is commutative, and that both ways are really right because of that. That’s the better and more important thing for students to learn at this level, that is being lost here. Author also argues that appeals to more advanced math concepts (that matrices are conventionally given as row x column, and something mumble mumble about arrays in computer programming languages) are bullshit, being totally beyond the scope of anything that a grade-school child should need to know anything about.
Author insists that this is a problem with the teaching (or, as commonly stated, the curriculum) and not the stated goals or objectives of Common Core.
This is not an IMHO thread, but:
I agree A LOT with the bolded. Elementary-school math teachers (at least those my children have had) have gotten well away from rote memorization of a relatively small number of useful facts in favor of “understanding why” the numbers work the way they do. They’ve had it backwards for some time … the rote stuff lays the foundation, and is vitally important.
What’s the research you’re relying on to come to that conclusion?
I’d rather the child instinctively think of “4”. Like learning to spell a word: “10 - 6 = 4”.
Some percentage of kids will struggle with that, admittedly. In those cases, it makes sense to marshal different teaching methods more in line with what’s being taught in the Common-Core era. Extra visualization probably helps kids who have a hard time with rote learning.
Personal belief, and memories of having learned that way. No research, no evidence, no proof. I believe it nevertheless, though I recognize that rote learning is not for all kids.
I admit using myself as the “model child” may be problematic. I found most grade-school math very easy. I do remember that memorizing the times tables in 2nd grade was a challenge, and I flubbed them with frequency throughout that school year.
It seems to me that some (not all) of the examples of teachers marking problems wrong when the kid got there the “wrong way” are due to the kid having a BETTER than anticipated understanding of the math principals.
The whole point of teaching this way should be so that the kid starts to see the “system” and begins to make the next small step or even giant leap on their own. That is the magic tipping point of learning, and it seems like a lot of these examples are of kids being swatted down just when they are starting to fly.
Yes…and going back to the OP, they don’t have to learn to write checks with them.