Common Core Foolishness

Interesting anecdotal story. We home-school our 12 year old. We're actually using a 1975 8th grade math text book. Once he's done with it, he'll have qualified for high school senior math (2015) and can actually be done if we so wished.

Next is more algebra, calc, trig. then physics should be a breeze.

With all the high-tech toys available, the best method of teaching/learning math has been. . .

Wait for it. . . .

. . . . . Wait for it. . . . . .

Flash cards.

I'd say your kid is very lucky, actually. Working on a College campus and right at the edge of admissions and placement for what students are going through, it's a damn shame to see what the "Common Core" idiocy is doing to them. We're getting kids in at this stage who can't even pass to remedial levels of English and Math, but they have their spiffy H.S. Diploma to say they were 'taught' those things. 

Too bad the real world doesn't work on paper facts, or they'd be set. In reality and when practical skills are called for? It's outright sad and pathetic to watch kids (and I use that term for anyone in the 20 something range..) do as poorly or worse than *I* did, as a first time college student away from any schooling for over 20 years when I started. They ought to be worlds beyond that, having usually been IN classrooms within the past 12 months for completion of High School.

In terms of Common Core Math? It is sheer insanity. I've sat and talked about this with faculty in our math dept, and even they couldn't initially understand the "Counting Up" method, when first seeing it. I can understand it fine, but again... Insanity. This is what slackers and losers in Math developed to cheat through the courses, IMO, because it's SUPER Short cutting fundamentals to ATTEMPT to teach end result critical thinking ..that takes years of that fundamental education to REACH. Of course.. slackers and losers wouldn't understand that, and they now RUN much of the national level priorities.

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What I do for the college is working with students with severe disability, to work through courses they may not normally be thought capable of. Blind students learning functional Power Point, in all its aspects, for instance. I also work with remedial level students with disabilities, to assist them in making minimum entrance requirements for mainline classes. In all that, you can basically term my job as 'instructing tutor and pro-problem solver'. It's just part of the job to have to do, in finding solutions every day. 

In doing that.....and remedial math to break it down into little steps at times? OH yeah.... I recognize precisely what this is, and again.. INSANITY. 

Counting up *IS* what we recognize, and we'd better, because it is how the brain breaks it down and shortcuts the process, once the process has been mastered to subconsciously find shortcuts around. Its a natural evolution of thinking, and something to actually work TOWARD tiggering in a student, to see them adapt beyond obvious solutions and specific approaches being taught. 

To try and teach end stage critical thinking skills..as the INITIAL approach?! It's lazy and stinkin' thinkin' that can, does and regularly IS breaking when applied to higher math where taking that kind of stupid time is just NOT happening, if success is what someone expects to see as an outcome. Working OUT what should be advanced mental problem solving, on paper, as a taught technique? 

Where the heck do these "educators" come up with this?! I think the wrong people are "educating" while the right people are getting precious little "education".


 

I couldn't grasp math and got an 'F' every year until the middle of fourth grade. I figured out on my own how to do math the common core way, and recieved high scores from then on.

Most kids learn by rote- or did in the past, anyway. The small percentage of 'abstract thinkers' find it nearly impossible to learn by rote, and usually do rather poorly in school.

A lot of kids get left behind because the educational system caters to the majority and have no means of teaching the minority. Forcing kids to use abstact thinking they don't possess is just going to break the system the other way.

All I can say is that, for another story I never did get around to writing, I did a good deal of research on the nature and stakes of the Chinese College Entrance Exams. They are VERY intense, lifetime stakes for how you'll be permitted to develop and in what field that may happen in, and absolutely cut and dry to be unforgiving. It first got my attention, in fact, because a headline ran last Spring about anti-cheat methods including the use of drones in the exam classes to oversee students work. Drones??..I thought to myself?? In a classroom? Oh.. Well.. The problem wasn't imagination, but that I had NO CLUE what the scale of this actually IS in that nation.

That's a very good point,AnteBellum! That explains why the top echelon have such highly acclaimed private school, while the majority of citizens get less than second rate education.  It also solves the mystery ( for me, anyway) of why the government fights so hard against home schooling.

I had a friend who home schooled her children, and her second grader was doing work my fifth grader couldn't do- all with only three hours a day devoted to learning!