I wasn’t sure where to put this thread, it may be GQ, it may end up GD, I figured IMHO is kind of a compromise between the two.
I have generally positive feelings towards the Common Core standards, but I don’t actually know what it is that has made educators believe kids are generally capable of fulfilling them. What’s the research this is based on?
A lot. Some of it is based on research done in schools here in the US that have had those standards in place for some time now. The Chicago Public Schools were a testing ground for many (all?) of what have become the Common Core Standards in Mathematics. Our math scores have been steadily going up over the last decade or so. I’m personally delighted with the curriculum we’ve been using, and the Common Core emphasis on conceptual learning; we have had to supplement with some old school rote and drill, however. The great thing about Common Core is that it’s not a curriculum though; so teachers can and should add rote memorization to the schedule if their Common Core geared textbook doesn’t have it. In our house, that looks like 10 minutes of flash cards a night; certainly not onerous, especially as the rest of the homework has gone down in quantity.
Some of it is based on international research, looking at what kids in other nations are capable of. There’s no reason to believe that our kids are dumber than kids in other countries (although there is an argument to be made that other factors, like hunger and poverty, may need to be addressed to bring our students to their level, not just changing standards).
Some of it is based on looking at entrance requirements and remedial work in colleges and trade schools, and changing elementary and high school standards so that the remedial coursework will be unnecessary.
http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/myths-vs-facts/
But also, since we’re in IMHO…have you read the standards? They’re not exactly rocket science. I mean, they’re designed to prepare kids for studying rocket science, but they’re not, themselves, all that hard.
These are some of the Grade 8 (That’s 13 and 14 year olds, for the non-USAians reading along) standards in Mathematics:
How do I know 8th graders can do this? 'Cause I, and most of my peers, were doing this in 8th grade, and we weren’t really all that bright.
The Common Core standards are, at their heart, based on existing state standards. Before the Common Core, individual state standards ranged from “well thought out and aimed at success” to “slapped together with little coherency.”
States knew their standards were subpar, but lacked the resources to develop better ones or the political will to adopt standards that might show that the state’s true performance. A lot of states have truly bad education systems, and it’s hard to get political leaders to abandon the mishmashed standards that have been used to hide that.
I don’t think it’s hard either, but lots of people like to quote things like what you quoted and then rant about how ridiculously hard it is. I’d like to be able to say something more than “it doesn’t look hard to me.” The research you pointed to in your prior post should help with this.
I don’t think the standard is all that difficult to achieve for most kids. It’s the teaching methods that I take issue with. For example, kids are supposed to learn “math facts” (basic addition and times tables - knowing that 8+5=13 and 7x8=56) in the early grades but the teachers tell them not to memorize them. Instead, they teach them strategies for solving them. It’s a waste of time. Most kids can memorize them in a short time. It takes years (judging by the fact that 5th graders in our school system still test poorly on math facts) to learn them by using the strategies. The teachers I have spoken to say that memorization doesn’t work for all kids. Well, it works for the majority, so let them memorize and help the other kids with strategies. Instead, everyone is taught the strategies and they are all slowed down.
Your suggestion seems to be inconsistent with virtually everything that is scientifically understood about how education and human memory works.
To some extent, I agree with you, which is why I mentioned the rote memorization and flash cards in my post. You are correct that there is not an emphasis placed on memorizing multiplication tables and such. However, it is not forbidden for the teacher to add that, so if your child’s teacher told you that they could not memorize their math facts due to the Common Core compliant textbook that the school chose, then the teacher was mistaken. Nothing in Common Core Standards say that the children may not be taught math facts by memorization - merely that they must have a conceptual understanding of mathematical principles. Should not is a little different, and that teacher is going to have his own professional opinion based on what he’s learned about teaching math to youngsters. He may have found that letting them memorize facts too soon interferes with their willingness or ability to then learn the concepts behind them.
The reason for teaching concepts is to promote literacy in mathematics the way we promote literacy in reading. That is, if I handed you a copy of Dick and Jane and you memorized it (as many preschoolers memorize their favorite books), and you sat in front of a tester, opened the book and recited it, turning the pages at the correct time…could we really say you’d learned to read? What happens when I hand you Goodnight, Moon? You wouldn’t be able to read it, because you hadn’t learned the concepts behind how letters go together to make words, and words to make sentences, and sentences paragraphs. You wouldn’t understand how main ideas are supported by supporting ideas, or when italics are placed for emphasis. You wouldn’t be truly literate if all you’d been able to do was memorize a book, or even many books.
Same thing in math. Memorize your times tables, sure. It will make things faster later. But also get it into your head that 3X4 is the same thing and 4X3 is the same thing as 3+3+3+3 is the same thing as 4+4+4 is the same thing as 6+6 is the same thing a 6X2. 'Cause that’s going to be important later.
Not having kids, I haven’t paid much attention to Common Core. This thoughtful article gives the background & reactions from different groups; the topic will come up in the race for the Presidency.
And just to pre-emptively address a common misconception, Common Core is not federal. It’s still all state standards; the states involved (which are most but not all of the 50) just decided to collaborate on them.
Also, another misconception, if I understand correctly, is that common core has anything to do with teaching methods. Common core just says “3rd graders need to understand multiplication.” If you’re seeing some new techniques for teaching multiplication, that’s just school boards trying something new (they probably bought a new set of textbooks and associated workbooks), not “Common Core” itself.
This is the biggest misconception I see in relation to common core. You’ll see someone post a strange math question with weird ways of solving it on facebook or twitter (Louis CK went a little nuts with this on twitter, for example) an then scream about how stupid Common Core is and how it shouldn’t be taught in schools. That math question in their picture and the method of solving it that is shown have nothing to do with Common Core because Common Core is a set of standards, not a methodology, but that doesn’t stop the frothing rage from people who are upset about it.
It’s so funny, because this really did start as a bipartisan, common sense reform. The “politicization” is entirely manufactured.
That’s true, but it is also true that a lot of what common core emphasizes is conceptual knowledge, as WhyNot pointed out, and that is going to require somewhat different teaching methods than simply knowing your times tables, which can be learned just fine through rote memorization alone.
WhyNot’s comparison to literacy is exactly on point. Many people were taught math and want their kids taught math the way that old people want to learn computers. I’ve taught older friends to use computers before and when they start, they are intimidated and confused, and they don’t want to know how a browser works or what an operating system is; they want a list of step-by-step instructions of what to type where to get to their email account. It works fine until the icon for Firefox gets moved, or Gmail updates, or any tiny thing changes, because they didn’t learn what they were doing and why. I try to tell them that using a computer is like driving a car. Even if they only ever want to go to the grocery store, I can’t teach someone to drive by writing down how many seconds to press the accelerator before turning the steering wheel 75 degrees clockwise. It might work once if you’re lucky, but it’ll be a disaster the next time you try it and the lights have a different schedule, or someone tries to use the crosswalk.
Math is the same. People think they were taught math successfully because they passed the tests, but then you see them (or me, for that matter!) trying to figure their share of the tip on a shared meal. Sure, we can multiply if the numbers are laid out in front of us in neat rows. But a great many of us can’t do much with it in real life, or can only do the bare minimum. Some might not even realize that it could be better, or if we do, we chalk it up to “not being a math person.”
We want our children to be as familiar and natural at doing math as we expect people to be about reading, or driving a car, or using a computer if they’re under 50. We don’t accept someone “not being a reading person” or “not being a driving person,” even though those are extremely complex, complicated activities. That means teaching children not just the steps they can memorize, but why and how those steps work, and when and why to use them, and when to put the steps in a different order, and what other steps might work instead, and why and how those steps work.
It requires a different kind of teaching and different work from the kids, but a lot of parents don’t like that. And a lot of teachers don’t communicate with the parents well (and vice versa). Giving homework about understanding the steps means that the steps need names and so do the concepts, but the parents look at the homework and say, “Number line? Fact families? Mentally visualized five-groups? What the hell is this crap? I don’t use this when I pay bills/balance my checkbook/send rockets to Mars/see if I have enough change for a McDouble! Why don’t they just teach kids to multiply like they taught me???”
Good points. I’ve dealt with the computer example myself when trying to teach certain older people how to check email, or pay bills online. I have to do do something like write out:
Then, if Firefox pops up a dialog one day saying that there is a new version of Firefox and do you want to download it, they can’t cope. They call frantically saying that “The computer is messed up again, can you come over to help?” If the website doesn’t come up because their modem got unplugged, they complain that “Someone broke my Internet please helllpppp!11!!!one”. They may blame the kids next door, them and their “hacker” attitude.
It’s as if they can’t seem to wrap their head around the concept of understanding how websites, email, and other things work, so they can, y’know, figure out where the login button might be. They don’t understand the concept of a login button.