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Reality check: All through school, the teachers told us how important advanced mathematics was going to be in our day to day life, and how important it would be in our jobs.
It was mostly lies!
Yes, basic math skills were and are important. Yes, algebra and geometry were important in my work as a sheet metal fabricator on aircraft.
But, y'know, I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I have had to determine a square root in the last 40 years. I don't think I have ever had to determine a cube root since I graduated from high school.
I have never had any use for calculus. Never had it in school, never needed it in my lifetime. Oh, sure, some folks do need it, and for college prep courses it may even be necessary.
Personally, I find the "math" in the OP example to be cumbersome and wasteful.
Of course, there IS one definite advantage; if any of my grandkids ask for help with math homework, I can honestly say I can't help, I know nothing about what they are doing!
And don't want to learn!
Perhaps the square root is not needed, but if something has to be squared, then by definition the square root is included, as one is the inverse of the other. Area often involves length/width and if they're the same, there's the square.
I learned math the boring, old fashioned way and have always been decent at math.
The common boring way worked for roughly all of recorded time, put men on the moon, and is still used everywhere on Earth minus our new age emotion-driven child indoctrination centers masquerading as schools. It's like the phrase I use when parents of kids I tutor question my near manic hatred of calculators - if Pythagoras could give us Trig by drawing in the sand with a stick, I assure you that your child can learn Trig without a calculator.
Same thing with learning the boring old fashioned arithmetic. If it got us from the Stone Age all the way to last week in Hippie Teacher Lounge Feel Good Kum By Yah Land, it must have some merit, eh? And if all the countries not using it keep beating our national rear end in Math, then clearly simple logic is no longer taught in Education undergrad courses of study, or they'd be able to spot the pattern.
Quote:
Originally Posted by passwithoutatrace
I don't understand why people think Common Core is weird or stupid. It is a very easy way of breaking down math for people who have trouble, and the majority of people who claim to be good at math do most of the concepts automatically in their heads. I work on boats and don't always have a calculator or dry piece of paper and pencil handy. If I have to do math problems in my head I use the exact same concepts Common Core uses, automatically, because it makes it easy. When I am at the office I usually use Excel because I don't want to calculate thousands of values but I still know how to solve the problems.
I also call BS on a parent with a so-called engineering degree not being able to solve that problem, since it requires the ability to count by 10s and 100s. Most people with basic math skills can count by 10s.
Regular addition requires adding single digit numbers, right to left, one place at a time.
Regular subtraction requires subtracting single digit numbers, right to left, one place at a time.
There is no easier way to do either and arrive at a correct answer. Write an algorithm for the old, boring way and the new touchy feely common core way, and old boring uses fewer steps using fewer concepts. That's why it has worked for a few thousand years...simplicity. And "exactly right" beats "sorta kinda close enough" every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
And arithmetic is about correct, exact answers, not keeping a journal of how you applied project management fundamentals by strategizing with your inner stakeholder about possible right answers that should be referred to a committee.
The political slant that's being put on this common core stuff just shows how irrational our public discourse has become.
If you talk to people on the right, it's a "socialist takeover" of education by the Feds led by the Communist/Maoist/Kenyan Obama, or a "touchy feely" version of math.
If you talk to left wingers, it's a corporate takeover of education with an end goal to destroy the public schools.
I've heard both of these opinions from different people about the SAME education policy.
Eveyryone's opinions seem to be getting more and more hyperbolic with every issues that pops up.
I don't know if common core is good or bad, but I'm just looking for an opinion from someone that doesn't sound like it came out of Rush Limbaughs mouth, or pick whatever left wing bomb thrower you want.
LOL at this . Why shouldn't the average student have to do calculus. Really, if presented well it isn't that hard.
So you didn't watch the video of the child psychologist explain why? Small children's minds work differently, and are not capable of abstraction ... so either they struggle and stress out or they learn to respond to the training with appropriately memorized answers, without having any grasp whatever of the underlying concepts.
Their brains are still developing ... and developmental appropriate educational methods are necessary for maximizing that development. Conversely, innapropriate methods will impede that development.
Watch the video, so that you might understand the damage being inflicted on your child is not a cause for celebration.
Quote:
Originally Posted by residinghere2007
FWIW, I actually have a child that is taking math and they have been using Common Core for a couple years now. Initially I was against it, but my son has really taken to it and is doing wonderfully in math. He actually is an "average" student and I feel all the new methods have really helped him in strengthening his math skills. He is now on the "gifted" end of math as he is now a tad over the 90th percentile on his quarterly assessments. He used to be in the 50th only 1.5 years ago before full implementation at his school.
According to his "assessments"? This, according to the standards as judged by the assessors? What if the standards are skewed or even out in left field? What then does that say for the assessment?
Listen .. I have seen some of the common core examples of math, and what it considers to be "correct answers" which make no sense whatsoever in either a mathematical perspective or a common sense one. So, if your child is excelling, that is not necessarily good news, and certainly not an accurate reflection of math skills, but more likely an ability to dismiss instinctual logical analysis in favor of conditioned response. That's not development, and it's not education ... it's training, indoctrination, and developmentally arresting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by residinghere2007
That said, he did have traditional math instruction from K-3 so maybe that has helped him, but I honestly feel like people just want to complain about CC just because they like to complain (hence this very forum lol).
I also don't see how learning approximation and doing math at an earlier age that is similar to calculus would so horrible detriment our math standings in the world. Other countries are already utilizing these methods. Many Asian countries in particular have numbers that include math addition math concepts and some "experts" feel that is why they usually perform better than our country. Preschoolers learning to count in Korea learn about addition just by counting.
I don't know how it will all turn out but just wanted to put it out there that everyone can and should learn at least something about calculus and that I have a child doing this math and for me, once I get out of the traditional "work it out" mindset, it is actually much easier to do math the way they are now teaching it. And FWIW, my son still does not rely on a calculator and he is in 6th grade. He has one but always "forgets" about it because he is really good now in figuring out the answers to problems in his mind and he also has an excellent teacher this year who has taught him how to "math journal" in regards to explaining how he achieved specific answers. Also wanted to point out that the majority of the worksheets he brings home are number heavy and not wordy. They usually have an example at the beginning of the review but after that just a series of problems to solve.
Again, you really need to watch the video ... she's very entertaining, funny, and uses practical examples to illustrate how far out in left field this methodology really is.
If I could recall the specific example I looked at a while back, I'd present it, but I don't. Suffice it to say that the "correct" answer was so mind numbingly assinine, that to train someone to view that as the correct answer isn't far from instructionally induced mental illness!
Traditional math techniques which call upon breaking down a problem in blocks of hundreds, tens and ones, is a transferable skill to other areas having nothing to do with math, yet builds problem solving skills that are applicable to a vast array of problems that one will confront for the rest of their lives.
The reality is, different parts of the brain deal with different activities, and many of these new concepts in teaching bypass critical areas under development which would benefit from exercise, while other less developed areas are called upon to process in a manner it is incapable of in it's current stage of development. This leads to frustration and arrested development, poor self esteem, and stress that these children have to endure.
While the lady in the video identified many problems, what she seems to miss is the deliberate nature of this insidious assault on our children's minds. This isn't about poor techniques and unintended consequences. This is a methodical dumbing down of our children, and teaching them to think in collectivist terms and subjective rather than objective terms. She highlighted this with examples from 2nd grade instructional material that calls for group assessments of the students work from other students of the same class who have no legitimate ability or business judging and assessing a fellow 7 year old's work. It's preposterous nonsense on the surface, but makes perfect sense if you want to produce mindless drones incapable of independent thinking.
The political slant that's being put on this common core stuff just shows how irrational our public discourse has become.
If you talk to people on the right, it's a "socialist takeover" of education by the Feds led by the Communist/Maoist/Kenyan Obama, or a "touchy feely" version of math.
If you talk to left wingers, it's a corporate takeover of education with an end goal to destroy the public schools.
I've heard both of these opinions from different people about the SAME education policy.
Eveyryone's opinions seem to be getting more and more hyperbolic with every issues that pops up.
I don't know if common core is good or bad, but I'm just looking for an opinion from someone that doesn't sound like it came out of Rush Limbaughs mouth, or pick whatever left wing bomb thrower you want.
I taught HS science for over 20 years. We used a fair amount of math in the physics courses.
As someone who's been on the front lines, I'll say this:
Common core is absolutely another political approach to education, really just relabeled NCLB. Anyone involved in any real way with education can tell you what a farce that turned out to be.
As for the ever-changing approaches to teaching certain subjects, that is not being driven by the schools. It's coming from publishers and "consultants" who feed heavily at the public education trough.
As I previously posted. It's all about the money. Always.
I don't know if common core is good or bad, but I'm just looking for an opinion from someone that doesn't sound like it came out of Rush Limbaughs mouth, or pick whatever left wing bomb thrower you want.
:rant:
Saying this as both libertarian and math/debate/college prep tutor - the quasi-nationalization of education that began with the Dept of Education was the political bugaboo that began the downward trajectory of education in this country, and that was bipartisan, and I could care less about Republicans or Democrats, so I blame neither and both in that respect.
Common Core is just this week's attempt, again supported and opposed by both sides for whatever political reasons they conjure up, at trying to put an angry genie back into its bottle. The angry genie is the failure of the new age concept that teaching is about something other than knowledege transfer, and testing to rigorous standards is something other than evaluating how well knowledge got transferred. The political layer over top of it is using blame games to try and secure votes with the anger and fear of the populace, not about improving education.
Let's take arithmetic in Common Core. Nonsense like dot grouping in blocks, number bonds as intermediate steps to solutions, etc are all ways to introduce "partial credit" into a simple, straightforward, binary process in order to help salvage self-esteem in case wrong answers occur. Read the common core literature about "deeper understanding" and other bromides that are equivalent to participation ribbons and not keeping score in sports. Forget the political crap, like standardized tests, teacher pay, etc and focus on common core attempting to remove the concept of correct/incorrect from arithmetic (one area that I care about, not the only thing common core does poorly), which is essentially trying to standardize and nationalize a few of the "organic, montessori, learn math by singing songs and talking to dolls on a therapist's couch" New Age methods into federal standards.
But arithmetic is everyone's first lesson in formal logic because it introduces us to the symbol of truth... "=". An arithmetic problem is our first proof of truth, of absolute correct and incorrect. My problem with common core is that it seeks to undermine binary logic, where A is A. In common core, A is whatever you feel like it being so long as you have a deeper understanding of your feelings. Everything is maybe. Problem is, science, engineering, physics, finance, law, etc are all binary, correct/incorrect when you get to the fundamental layer. If we start our children off learning that close enough approximation, kinda_sorta estimations and wrong answers that look pretty and make you feel good about yourself are all fine substitutes for correct/true, then we handicap them at the point in their life where learning is actually easiest and their brain retains input the best.
I could give a crap about how it affects either party, since I'd like every member of both parties to rot in an oubliette in northern Siberia while they reflect on just what godawful, miserable wretches of humans they really are. What I care about is mathematics, the script with which God wrote the universe. I care about truth and logic, 1 and 0, correct and incorrect, and the sanctity of the "=" symbol. Common Core corrupts it, infects it and rots it, ironically, to the core. It is intellectual cancer, created in a lab of hippie weirdo 12 step knuckleheads to make the world as idiotic as they are. In short, it is a tool for destroying minds right at the point we should be carving them into well honed tools, all so administrators can have better test scores to make other administrators happy long enough to get some other administrators to write bigger administration checks. Your children are being zapped with a bureaucratic Retardo Laser, turned into calculator dependent monkeys, and robbed of the ability to THINK all so some bureaucrat can claim they helped.
I taught HS science for over 20 years. We used a fair amount of math in the physics courses.
As someone who's been on the front lines, I'll say this:
Common core is absolutely another political approach to education, really just relabeled NCLB. Anyone involved in any real way with education can tell you what a farce that turned out to be.
As for the ever-changing approaches to teaching certain subjects, that is not being driven by the schools. It's coming from publishers and "consultants" who feed heavily at the public education trough.
As I previously posted. It's all about the money. Always.
Correct ... it IS all about the money from the standpoint of the front line soldiers waging this war. But the most important point is allowed to escape if we agree that this is money driven, and that the consequences are just collateral damage, rather than the main objective.
The "money" has to have a source, and that source must in turn have it's own agenda for supplying that money!!
Dumbed down, compliant, group thinkers are far more easily manipulated and controllable than intelligent, knowledgeable, logical, independent thinkers who dare to analyze and question, rather than comply and obey.
The exercise is geared to teaching these children at a very early age to embrace relative truth, and accept subjective majority opinion, rather than absolute truth to frm their own objective opinion.
In short, they are being taught not to think for themselves, but to accept the thoughts of others.
What's funny about Common Core math is that for things like subtraction and division, they teach endless approximations instead of the standard arithmetic methods. This may sound like it is easier than learning a specific method, but here's the thing...endless approximation is essentially Calculus. In Calc I, you first learn about derivatives by endless approximation of tangent lines towards a specific point, and in Calc II, you first learn about integration as endless approximation of rectangles under a curve.
So common core, this thing that is supposed to make math easier, uses Calculus techniques to teach arithmetic? Uhm...OK?
537 - 426 is much easier to solve by (7-6)+(30-20)+(500-400). Successive single digit subtraction, where the hardest part is the "borrowing" concept we all learned the 2nd week of 2nd grade. Endless approximation? Not sure why we need to informally introduce lim x; x--> thinking to elementary school kids to teach them arithmetic, but then again, most new age nonsense escapes me.
I agree. I have a chem E degree (as a pre-med). My kids would bring home this "estimation" crap and I would tell them it is pure BS and just solve the problem.
I always asked them how many bridges and buildings would hold up with the use of "approximations"?!!?
The liberal agenda is simply killing education. Not everyone can get the right answer. If they cannot, try to teach them to do so. It they cannot be taught, flunk them.
Not everyone can "get a trophy" in life and losing can be instructive and build a desire to improve. When one rewards failure, one will get more failure.
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. Why shouldn't the average student have to do calculus. Really, if presented well it isn't that hard.
