At any rate, "Common Core" sounds like another Obama/Socialist thing.
Wrong? Please enlighten me.
C'mon, Mike. Obama isn't a socialist, and this has nothing to do with him or anything here, as you well know. So please just cut out the political crap. It's divisive. On topic...
I taught secondary math and some higher math for a couple decades, but never encountered "Common Core" until working in a special after-school program about a year ago. I wasn't super impressed. The idea behind this example apparently is not so much to teach computation, but to aid in understanding why we do certain things. I agree with Brett that this seems to have little value in either regard. What bothered me most about the Common Core approach was that the students were doing too many things at one time to be able to learn it. They did come back to review regularly, but that only disrupted the too many things they were doing at future times. Why they chose an example (above) where round off error cancelled and made the estimate and "logical" conclusion wrong is beyond me. Anyway, when I tried to help 3rd and 4th graders with their Common Core stuff after school last year, it appeared that I had many who had chosen one approach and rejected others. They were on "different pages" and confusion was common in these groups at that school.
Learning of math
is best structured so that we first learn the "whys" and "hows", finally memorizing key results (like multiplication tables or differentials) for subsequent uses. Then rote memorization must happen, or a kid is stymied for the future. So Common Core's purpose seems sound, but their implementation and execution sometimes approach the absurd - IMO. That humans have different learning rates and styles makes this more complicated, although I suspect these folks are trying to address that...not too well (again IMO).
I do remember the "New Math" that came along just after I completed my studies. As I recall, it seemed an attempt to teach to all students those things that we good math students had learned as short cuts or learning aids on our own.
That didn't seem so bad to me, but I could see that there were students for which this was not productive, but rather diverting and confusing. Nonetheless I taught my 8th Grade "Dummy math" students (before 'Political Correctness' and full realization of how that jargon hurt us - There IS a place for PC!) how to add and subtract in all number bases from 2 to 10. I don't now know how I accomplished that, but many of them liked it, and these were the kids who were not expected to be able to do this kind of thing. SO, sometimes I have to step back and re-analyze what I think kids can do and should try to do.
SO...I'm with a lot of you on Common Core, but I have to suggest that you not completely dismiss it on the basis of some pretty (seemingly) damning examples. Math is for more than simple computations and is pretty hobbled, if that's all one expects and asks of it.
For instance, Geometry has been mentioned. What was not understood about proofs is critical. Geometry for many years was - and probably still is - the
only high school course that taught logic and its use. I'll ask you to trust me on this, but I graduated from a small university that was founded as an honors college for Michigan State and had an exciting, incredibly qualified faculty. I took a philosophy course (that department was quite respected in its time) in logic. The members of my class were top students from the approximately 50% who had not flunked out in their extremely challenging first year. They ALL "knew" that they could think logically and express themselves on paper. Yet my "A-" (3.7) was the only grade in that class higher than a 2.0. I credit that to my UICSM Geometry class, in which we proved almost all of our theorems. I taught all of my high school students - laboriously - to do the proofs offered in the course. I look at the shoddy logic that goes on in running and just living in this country and think, "Why didn't these folks learn the simplest logic." Answer, because no one offered them the chance, and sloppy and self-gratifying rhetoric had to suffice.
A final example from 18 years ago: Sometimes in the inner city I was blessed with a small class of very able Advanced Math students. Our math curriculum had changed texts to a series called "Integrated Mathematics." That was not related to
social integration or calculus, but rather consisted of various kinds of math being used together. That mkeant that it had the same disadvantages as the "Common Core" approach seems to have. One year, while we were studying matrices as a method of solving several equations in as many unknowns, the book included ways of seeing things, but too few assigned problems involving actually finding solutions. About half the class was starting to "get it," but the others were floundering. So I copied several sets of problems from my Dad's old high school algebra book (ca. 1931), plus three pages of its explanation of how to do them and passed them out. The next day, the home work came in and the kids asked, "Why didn't you give this to us in the first place?" They already knew what the columns of numbers represented, so why should they not immediately learn the algorithm? Dad's old method solved their problems, and they didn't have to go off in all directions unprepared. I still remember the looks on their faces, when they realized that they could each actually
do this stuff.
So I'm with you on a lot of this, but these kids still need to know what we learned in our 1st - 3rd grade "Think and Do" books, where we drew lines and other grouping symbols to understand adding, subtracting, and multiplying. Then long division was harder, but possible to learn. There was a lot of that in Common Core, but really too much sometimes and, yes, sometimes it didn't seem well conceived. Common Core has
some good ideas, but I think they've sometimes gone a bit overboard, without enough grounding in use of what they're supposed to learn. Settle on one or, at most, a couple ways to learn what an operation means, and then teach "the way to do it." That would save some broken students, and some parents would get along better in overcoming their own fears and helping out.
SK
Topic: Common core (Read 15431 times)
