" … There’s just one problem. What’s replacing the Common Core is, by and large, the same thing in a new package." …
Wait, the Old Common Core is still fighting for acceptance, and has been barely implemented in a lot of places. Now there’s a NEW one?
The article indicates that some states are dumping the Common Core brand name because of political opposition, but the standards replacing it are very similar (and, in many cases, the pre-Common-Core curriculum standards were very similar to the Common Core ones).
A number of kids in my son’s HS had to take standardized tests and just answered the questions without reading them, making it all a big waste of time. Others just skipped those days of school.
The answer to why the change, and to 99% of all questions asked about education standards, is “money.”
This article articulates something I have been wondering about. I was taught to “make 10” in the late 1970s. I have a friend who was taught that in the early 1950s. I see friends complaining about their kids learning this concept because it is Common Core but it doesn’t seem all that new to me. The concept of “carrying the one” only makes sense if you understand you are making ten, right?
Before Common Core (which is technically not allowed in my state), my kids had a math assignment each week where they were to have three people besides themselves work the problem. Their assignment was to evaluate the different ways each person got to a correct answer assuming we did because quite often my husband or I would not due to not reading the question correctly.
I get that it is cool to be anti-Common Core but some of the concepts seem to be oldies but goodies that have worked for generations.
Much ado about nothing. Our district just switched to CC and so far the only difference I’ve noticed is the year end test for NCLB. Instead of the state test, the kids now take Smarter Balanced. I’ve heard rumors that eventually the SAT will be changed to be closer to these CC tests.
“I get that it is cool to be anti-Common Core but some of the concepts seem to be oldies but goodies that have worked for generations.”
I’m actually pro Common Core if it’s a good one (another debate) but I agree with those who criticize abolishing old but effective methods of teaching – whether that be in math, reading or science – for the sake of the “new.” In too many cases, the proponents of the “new” are consultants and administrators who need to justify their jobs, working without teachers’ input. Change for change’s sake – and the sake of those who stand to profit from it. (Not the kids, not the teachers, not the schools.)
Our district switched to Common Core. Why I am against it:
- Last year math teachers were "trained" all the time. Kids were taught by substitutes, while math teachers were re-trained for new standards.
- This year teachers were teaching without textbooks. Doable, but messy.
- This year Algebra teacher didn't know what he is supposed to cover for the next Chapter test. Tests were designed somewhere in the district, teacher was not aware (even approximately) what are they planning to test.
- The "advancement" curriculum is a mess.
I went through every question of the entire released math tests from 4th grade to algebra 2. My feeling is
1.) They made the algebra 1 super difficult. There is a giant gap between 8th grade test and Algebra 1.
2.) The entire structure of common core is lacking variable or symbol manipulation, so the students will be very weak later if they study STEM.
3.) Modeling of some real world problems is far from the truth. The materials teach the wrong things in this case.
Gettingschooled–Carrying the “one” (in the 60’s) was taught that it indeed was the “10’s place”. (and 100’s, 1000’s)
The difference is that what took us 10 seconds(if that long) to answer problems (especially since we memorized addition, multiplication tables with speed drills and flashcards) is being turned into a half page of “showing your work” for one problem and it shouldn’t. That’s a nightmare. It’s like reading one letter at a time rather than the whole word. It’s confusing and handicapping a generation or two of students. And sorry, I’ll never understand that a math problem can be estimated (and the right answer marked wrong). I know plenty of parents who have turned to private and home schooling because of the nonsense.
Math problems should always be mentally “estimated” first so that one has some idea what answer to expect. I see it all the time that students just write down whatever number they get (usually from their calculators) without any thought whatsoever as to whether it makes sense or not.
Problem: “Convert the distance from New York to Montreal from miles to meters.”
Student answer: “3 meters”.
And if the student just does the problem and happens to get the right answer, he may still have no idea whatsoever whether it actually makes sense or not, so just doing it misses the point.
Well, guess what? We were taught how to check our work and also make sure the answer was reasonable… And it still didn’t take a half page of busy work. It took another 10 seconds.
^How would you convey to a teacher that you had made sure the answer was reasonable?
From what I have seen so far in my D’s math, I still cannot make my mind about their CommonCore implementation. They say all the right things in general, but do it mostly wrong.
They had less topics covered in (advanced, 6th grade) preAlgebra leaving more time to go in depth for more difficult topics- good. But then they have “group problem solving” - trivial (mental math type) problems were supposed to be solved in the groups with mandatory discussions. I don’t think problem solving belongs to the group activities(except in some rare cases). Then, their problems became “stories” - a page-long story for the single-step problem. My D was annoyed to no end but she says many kids liked it because “those stories made the problems interesting” - not quite what we call “interesting math problem” in our household but then all the kids are different. I still think stories belong to LA/SS courses, not in math.
Overall, the main complaint from D was that there were too much categorizing of the possible solutions and talking about the types of problems and too little of actual problem solving. She supplemented with Khan academy, but why to waste precious school time?
Do you mean what used to be called “word problems”?
Seems like the idea was to get students to think of how math can be applied in various situations, though it is not obvious that math instruction (then or now) has been effective in getting people to consider when and how math can be used to solve problems in daily life.
Their school routinely calls the exercises “word problems” when they are not strictly numerical or algebraic expressions but require those expressions derived from the “story” or “real life” situation. The idea is as old as the world and was always used in math instruction (and nothing is wrong with it BTW) but should those “stories” be pages long so they need to read a whole Red Riding Hood story to solve a simple problem in the end? Another problem is that they don’t really solve the problems or apply the solutions in daily life but sort and categorize them and draw diagrams of those solutions. This activity cannot hurt but only after the topic is mastered and problems are solved, not instead of it.
The griping of people about the Common Core - and especially the Common Core math component - has going from silly to irritating to me.
For example - and I’m glad the NYT article brought it up - “making 10,” a strategy for learning addition. I’m a quantitative social scientist who uses advanced statistics in my work every day and I still use this method to do mental math. I went to first grade in 1992. “Making 10” is not new! It may have been called something different before or taught in a slightly different way, but the technique itself is not new.
Criticisms of incorrect mathematical reasoning is ALSO important. One of my pet peeves about the way that math is often taught in classrooms is that it’s disembodied - there’s too much emphasis on the answer, not the process. But math IS a process, a way of thinking and we do our kids a disservice when they hit higher-level math and realize that it’s not as simple as doing this and spitting out that. The process is just as important as the answer. There’s the fact that sometimes you can get the right answer using the wrong process just on a fluke, and that will do you a disservice later. There’s the fact that some methods are far more time-intensive than others, which will put you behind when you have to do that operation as part of a chain of operations in higher-level math. And there’s also the fact that thinking about certain operations in certain ways helps prepare you for the next step of math.
YES. I hated timed multiplication drills in fifth grade. I appreciated them later when I needed to do multiplication quickly to solve complex problems in algebra and calculus classes.
That’s got to be another one of my pet peeves about K-12 education - the compartmentalization of subjects as if they are completely unrelated to each other. Math IS stories. The reason why we developed math as humans is to help us understand our natural world and universe. Newton wrote his Principia because he was totally obsessed with the movement of the stars and planets in the night sky and wanted to understand how it happened. The word geometry is literally derived from the Greek “earth measurement” because it was invented to measure astronomical observations as well as geological ones. Math wouldn’t exist without stories.
And math is a huge part of social studies - most of what we know about human behavior is supported by some kind of mathematical or statistical manipulation. Emile Durkheim, widely considered the father of sociology and one of the progenitors of modern social science, started the field by considering statistical charts of suicides in Catholics and Protestants. In the last two weeks I used applied math to understand what factors contributed to risky sex in poor people in New York, to see whether a public health intervention worked, and to assess how lifetime chronic stress affects people’s coping with day-to-day stressors. (And it should go without saying that one needs the reading, analytical, and critical thinking skills developed in the language arts to follow the conversation in the sciences and math and be able to think of creative ways to apply or invent new math to these problems.)
Talking about types of problems in groups helps students prepare for the next step, when solving the problems isn’t just about plugging and chugging but about selecting the right method for the right problem - often with a group of people. Earlier this week I spent 45 minutes in a meeting discussing with 5 other people the right mathematical model to use for a particular problem. We didn’t come up with a concrete answer, because there wasn’t one. It all depended on your categorization of the problem and exactly how you wanted to answer the question that was posed. Kids need to get comfortable with that ambiguity early on so that when they get to higher-level math, they’re used to it - they think of math as a science that’s constantly changing/in flux rather than something static.
@julliet, I agree with you on most items EXCEPT that they mostly don’t apply to middle school math.
Math helped and helps our understanding of universe and is derived from stories but they don’t study history of math in school - they barely have time to cover fractions and equations.
Subjects in school (and in college and people’s different specializations at work) are separated for a reason. While they do intersect (especially in higher level courses), kids need to know their basic facts and master basic skills first before they can combine them and apply to each other. You used math for all those problems because you already mastered it. You wouldn’t be able to analyze all those social problems if you were trying to learn all that math at the same time. One cannot study calc-based physics without first mastering at least some calculus concepts. If you try to teach kids how to solve the equations while exploring ancient China, either equations or China (or both!) will suffer. You can mention math in history or history in math but you cannot learn them at the same limited time. Kids do need to learn to deal with ambiguity in real life problems - as an extra project when they already learned the topic. They definitely benefit from group work - where it makes sense. But they still need to master the basics and there is no other way to learn it than by actually doing, practising the problems themselves. If the whole time is spent solving in groups the problems which they should solve mentally on the fly, nothing is learned. Imagine discussing for an hour with 5 other people the mathematical model for a particular problem which all 6 of you know, which is obvious for all of you and there IS a concrete answer which all of you figured out an hour ago.
While I agree that students need to master basic skills, one of the problems with the separation of subjects is that they often don’t see how any of this is relevant to them or to what interests them. “When will I ever have to factor a polynomial?” they say derisively. So they have no motivation to do more than get through the next exam. What julliet is talking about isn’t the history of math, it’s the deeper meaning, if you will.
That all boils down to “getting them interested”. A good teacher is generally able to do it - with deeper meaning, history, relation to other things they learn or usefulness of specific things in life. The problem is that sometimes (and more often than not) no one can tell them “when they will ever factor a polynomial”. The answer could be “never”. Deeper meaning, bigger picture can (and should!) be useful, especially when kids want some justification for hard or boring parts of studying, but the actual learning should go first and not be replaced by all the fluff around it.