Thursday, October 2, 2014

If we are going to Hell in a handbasket - is Common Core the basket?

I am not going to belabor this posting and my blankety-blank feelings about this whole Common Core Curricula bovine excrement - I'll simply say this.   My kids survived New Math and all it's faults... (thank God for hand held calculators) but mostly because old Dad insisted the learn and relearn their Times Tables, just like he did in his youth...

But now my great grandkids are being beat on the head with this Common Core Crapola (CCC) and old Great Grandpa ain't there to defend 'em!  Do y'all remember how we learned the simple act of subtraction?


325
-38
 287  

That's pretty straight forward isn't it?   Apparently not!!   Here is how Common Core wants it taught today..... 

I kid you not!  This page is right out of a 3rd Grader's CC math textbook!

Seems to me that this page in particular and the whole program in general would be an apt metaphor for why big gob'mint programs just don't work.  Never saw a successful Five Year Plan in USSR, and I sure as hell don't see a grand successful national education plan here! 

What do you think?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'm curious about the thinking of why the creators of this system think it is a good way to teach simple arithmetic. Is there something long term behind their thinking? Beyond that, one of the biggest problems in school these days is the reading ability, or lack
thereof, of a high percentage of students. So many are graduating from high school these days unable to read at a 9th grade level. I find it hard to believe that your average 3rd grader can read and understand well enough to comprehend these instructions. And even if you were to speculate that this is a spiffy system and most people could do it well, it is way too time-consuming compared to the way we learned.

You could make a case that it would help develop overall abilities to think but, that is not the point of learning arithmetic. I'm envisioning a testing scenario with this system. Seems like you would have to have a very limited number of questions on a test. Otherwise, you would have to set aside a rather long time to allow students to complete the test. Think about how many questions of similar difficulty in the above example you could answer using the old methods in the same amount of time it would take you to answer just one with this method.