The Man Behind Common Core Math

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/12/29/371918272/the-man-behind-common-core-math

by danso • 12 years ago

43 89 12 years ago

parfe7• 12 years ago

It hit the mainstream in early 2014, when a dad in North Carolina posted a convoluted "Common Core" question from his son's second-grade math quiz on Facebook, along with a letter he'd written to the teacher. "I have a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electronics Engineering which included extensive study in differential equations and other high-math applications," he wrote. "Even I cannot explain the Common Core mathematics approach, nor get the answer correct."

Lunch costs $14.45. You pay with a $20. If you calculate your change without borrowing you just did common core math. The best facet of common core is the amount of adults complaining they don't understand it. Rather than an argument against, it is exactly an argument in support of teaching kids multiple ways to think about math.

boobsbr• 12 years ago

If you calculate your change without borrowing you just did common core math.

Borrowing?

trebor• 12 years ago

The OP may mean calculating from left to right, instead of right to left. One is merely the reverse of the other.

EG:

    $20 - $14.45 = ...
    $6    ($0.45 excess)
    $5.60 ($0.05 excess)
    $5.55 ($0.00 excess)

Instead of:

    $20 - $14.45 = ...
    $0.05 ($14.50 total)
    $0.55 ($15.00 total)
    $5.55 ($20.00 total)

Kallikrates• 12 years ago

"you can't subtract 5 from 0, so borrow 10 from 4, now its 5 from 10" and so on

parfe7• 12 years ago

Some random gis image. http://i.imgur.com/RvAUuPK.jpg

Compare that to how you could solve the problem in your head.

.01 + .70 + 6.00

For my example I bet you'd think 5¢ + 50¢ + $5.00 to compute your change.

AngrySkillzz2• 12 years ago

Add 5 cents to get 14.50, add 50 cents to get 15, add 5 dollars to get 20. .05 + .50 + 5 = $5.55. Much easier than "1, carry the 6"

vfrbgt2• 12 years ago

Yes, but that works great when doing it on the spot in your head, and not so on paper where you have the benefit of writing down the steps of ( non-core ) arithmetic algorithms.

Common core breaks down when you have to involve writing down the steps due to the size of the operands and there ordinary algorithms shine.

parfe7• 12 years ago

No it doesn't break down. The point of common core is to help students understand why. The how is important but learning the rote algorithms are as helpful for understanding as using a calculator.

bane8• 12 years ago

The problem with Common Core is that it phrases questions like yours using weird words and focuses on specific procedures instead of the correct answer (or a range or reasonable answers).

So depending on some factors, your question might be answerable with either "about $5" "about $5.50" "$5" "$5.50" or "$5.55".

Which one is the one that will get the child a correct mark? No idea. But you can see any number of angry parents posting pictures of they're children's homework grades where "$5.55" is marked wrong even though it's the most correct.

Some people will argue that "well the subject was about estimation", well that still leaves the child with 4 possible correct answers, but school being school, only one of them will be counted as "correct" and anything else will be marked wrong.

It turns what's normally an error bounded estimation problem with degrees of accuracy into a binary right/wrong problem that looks exactly like arithmetic and is graded like arithmetic, but unless you have the curriculum guide with the answers in it, it's a crap shoot to figure out what the expected "correct" answer is.

parfe7• 12 years ago

While I don't doubt some teacher at some school somewhere on america may have done something ill conceived, do you have a source? A quick Google found some common core work on estimation which was multiple choice, clearly geared towards understanding magnitude.

Teachers don't sit around all day thinking up ways to trick students and anger their parents.

kaitai4• 12 years ago

Common Core doesn't phrase the questions in weird ways. The standards are clear and don't tell you how to teach. Much of the training around it and essentially all of the curriculum (repackaged old stuff, new section headings on the same crap) is terrible. But that's the corporatization of education and the poor support for professional development of US teachers at work, which we allow to happen regardless of curriculum content.

http://www.corestandards.org/Math/

spdustin• 12 years ago

Those weird words and procedures are taught to the students. My kids understand them just fine. It's the parents who aren't in the classroom getting the instruction that goes along with the homework that are complaining.

I simply ask my kids, on those occasions where I can't suss it out on my own, what concept the teacher was teaching them about. I don't expect a perfect answer to that question - their teachers are instructing learners and not teachers after all - but the responses to my question usually give me enough context to recognize that they are just a new vernacular for the way my mind does math anyway.

danso• 12 years ago

I had to look up this allegedly befuddling question, because I assumed the dad was just being a partisan complainer. Here's what came up: http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/16/bizarro-common-core-kinder...

(to save you the clickthrough: it's a single-page question consisting of a simple illustration of a day at the park...the prompt is: "Today in class your child practiced telling subtraction stories. For tonight's homework, your child will tell you 3 subtraction stories using the attached paper"...presumably, the child is supposed to look at the picture and observe, for example, that there are 10 trees and 9 birds, leaving 1 tree empty)

I stand corrected in my assumption: that is a bizarre question. I guess it depends on what was taught in class...if the class went over a similar question and walked through examples...then I guess it's a useful exercise...in the same way that I challenge students whom I teach programming to look at a real-life situation and think about how programming applies. Can 5-year-olds think like that? I seriously have no idea...I just came back from visiting my 1-year-nephew who apparently can recognize words in 3 different languages (English, Spanish, Vietnamese) and communicate common phrases (I'm hungry, I'm sorry) in sign language...admittedly, he still craps his own diapers, but still...I've forgotten how early-brain development can be.

Side note: Awhile ago, I asked why HN's Google pagerank was so low (something like a 4 or 5) Paul Graham has stated that the robots.txt on HN throttles Google spiders...and yet when I googled "north carolina common core dad"...the parent comment was one of the top search results. I guess HN's pagerank is moving up?

acdha3• 12 years ago

Daily Caller is a right-wing activist site, so be careful about anything they claim, particularly when it's an unsourced forward.

The big thing to remember is that Common Core doesn't actually dictate the implementation details people commonly complain about. It's possible that a particular state, district or school does something weird but that's like using some horrible enterprise Java monstrosity as an argument that object orientation is a bad concept.

adventured• 12 years ago

The inherent problem HN faces with pagerank, is that it's a site with a million outbound links. I would imagine also that thread pages tend to have more outbound links in them than they do backlinks going to them.

On the bright side, the PR result I just got in checking it, came back a seven (Reddit is an eight by comparison).

falcolas• 12 years ago

What prevents them from learning both ways? When learning math, I learned the normal way, where you do borrowing. Very useful for larger calculations, and quick when you understand the principals.

On the other hand, when we discussed money in grade school, we learned the "count up to nearest denomination increments. Was a bit harder to grasp since you have to think in coin denominations, but it's served me well since then at a few retail jobs.

Overall, though, the normal form of borrowing math has been more useful in my career than the denomination method. If you can't do normal borrowing math, advanced mathematics is going to be rough on you.

nemo4• 12 years ago

"What prevents them from learning both ways?"

Nothing at all, in fact they are actually required to learn both ways. The idea that Common Core is replacing borrowing with left-to-right is just part of a reactionary misinformation campaign.

jndsn402• 12 years ago

IMO, the problem with the way Common Core has been implemented is that there is a whole new analytical/critical thinking component that is bundled together with math. But parents when parents think of math they think of computation, arithmetic, formulas etc. Not 'explain why ancient calendars used 60-day units' (actual question from my daughter's 6th grade curriculum, may be misquoting a bit. The answer is because 60 has many factors).

I'm not saying it's good or bad to teach math that way, it was just not communicated well and still isn't. Math has been replaced with math+critical thinking. It's as if English class now also included Latin. Maybe good, maybe bad, but it's a whole different class.

jwmerrill3• 12 years ago

It's hard for me to imagine a world view where adding critical thinking to a subject might make it worse.

It's as if English class now also included Latin.

I think a better analogy would be "it's as if English class now included critical thinking." Or "it's as if Science class now included critical thinking." Or "it's as if History class now included critical thinking."

All of those sound unambiguously good to me.

debacle4• 12 years ago

The math curriculum I was exposed to in school (relatively recently, by any standard) always included critical thinking and was likely the subject that involved the most critical thinking because it was the subject where critical thinking was the most objective.

kaitai4• 12 years ago

As someone who teaches at the college level, I hope it works! Many American student come in not only unfluent with basic mechanical moves like adding fractions and dealing with exponents, but with little "number sense." Finding that you need to go -0.55 miles an hour to go from Cleveland to St. Loius (about 550 miles) in ten hours just does not faze some of them at all.

In college I'm always asking students to analyze the results to applied calculus questions and it can be a struggle and a revelation. You mean these numbers have meaning?!

logfromblammo2• 12 years ago

It seems odd to teach critical thinking with a stack of pre-printed worksheets that are the same for every student.

The infrastructure is not in place to teach those concepts successfully. The question "explain why ancient calendars used 60-day units" is no more elucidative than "explain why a week has 7 days" or "explain why the French Republican Calendar and the International Fixed Calendar failed to survive" or "meditate for 2 hours on the number 60".

I am saying unequivocally that it is bad to teach math that way. A kid does not have enough pre-existing knowledge of any ancient calendars for that association to help rather than confuse. If you're going to do that sort of thing, you have to tie into something that all kids at that age already know about. So really, you can only count on the stuff they have already been taught in school.

I don't recall, exactly, when I was taught about ancient calendars in school. Oh, wait, yes I do--it was never. I do recall someone asking once why a circle had 360 degrees in it, and the answer was, "It's essentially an arbitrary convention; we'll always be using radians in this class anyway."

While the high-level goals of the curriculum may be pedagogically sound, by the time that the course materials make it down to the classroom level, the original intent has been thoroughly diluted by the people trying to implement them.

Strilanc• 12 years ago

As powerful and influential in reshaping American classrooms as the standards could be, they don't include lesson plans, or teaching methods, or alternative strategies for when students don't get it.

That seems like a really serious flaw. Did the teaching community at least make and share their own?

grejdi• 12 years ago

We at BetterLesson have been working on this for the past 2 years. We have accumulated a vast amount of lesson plans from some of the best teachers throughout the country and from various environments, whether urban, suburban or rural. Teachers have free access to all these Common Core aligned lessons, among other standards that we have started supporting. See http://betterlesson.com/common_core/browse/624/ccss-math-con...

ashark• 12 years ago

That's what consultants are for.

The typical cycle for curricula, teaching strategies, and/or discipline plans in schools:

1) OMG the kids aren't learning better change everything!

2) District, state, or both pick some new system and pay some consultants and various companies a bunch of money.

3) Administrator presents plan to teachers: Here's the new system. Half of it's not finalized yet. Should be done in a year or two. We're not implementing some parts of it because they make me uncomfortable. The old way is stupid and sticking to even the parts of it that work well for you will result in my making your life miserable and eventually trying to fire you. You'll need to re-write all your lesson plans to conform to the new system. Here's a mountain of new paperwork for you. No, you can't stop filling out any of the old paperwork.

4) A couple years pass

5) Goto 1

acdha3• 12 years ago

A few years ago, a veteran teacher told me his version:

1. Introduce a new test with an unfamiliar blend of questions, new style questions, etc. but don't give teachers extra time to actually receive updated textbooks, update their classes, etc.

2. Start giving the test to students immediately before they have any experience with the new format

3. Use the result low test scores as proof that things were really bad before

4. As everyone gains experience with the new system, attribute rising scores entirely to the brilliance of the new model. Give bonuses to district / state officials.

5. Once scores plateau at roughly the previous levels after a few years, start talking about repeating the process. At no point should you seriously consider tackling the structural problems preventing holding perennially under-performing groups back.

sfrank2147• 12 years ago

That's not what standards are for - standards define what students should be learning and at what age, and teachers are responsible for making lesson plans to implement those standards. Every teacher has his/her own teaching style, imposing one method of teaching the standards would just piss everyone off.

And yes, teachers do share lesson plans, both online and within their schools.

kaitai4• 12 years ago

It's worth considering that in the US any lesson plans or teaching methods that are perceived as being "government-backed" are dead in the water, as they must be commie anti-christian plots to undermine American values of self-sufficiency and independence. This is one of the problems that Common Core is now encountering: it's being spun as a government program. It is in fact something a bunch of states put together for themselves.

Lesson plans from big companies like Pearson, on the other hand, are good because they come from businesses. However, there's a conflict of interest because many of the same companies write the exams. Worst of all, none of these companies actually develop teachers' abilities to teach. That's not really the fault of the companies; we just don't do that here in the US.

Teacher development is almost nil for a lot of K-12 teachers in the US, compared to Japan or Finland. The average US teacher is in the classroom 1080 hours a year and it's something like 600 in Japan and Finland. That 480-hr-per-year difference is spent on development and prep.

And yet there are a lot of really excited and entrepreneurial teachers and they're making and sharing all sorts of material. See TeachersPayTeachers, for instance.

ivan_ah• 12 years ago

KhanAcademy has a lot of CCSS-aligned exercises, many of them having rich js interactives. The coverage is also very good, probably better than anything commercial out there.

There is also an initiative to fund CC BY licensed educational content that school districts can use without getting milked by textbook publishers http://k12oercollaborative.org/

atratus• 12 years ago

I have looked over some of the common core material given to both early grade school and middle schoolers and its very clearly attempting to teach abstract reasoning. There is alot of word problems that ask how to decouple a concept from the concrete values calculated in a previous step. Most people from older generations are not going to see the value in this... parents (and teachers) need to know there is much more to math than arithmetic

ploxiln• 12 years ago

Isn't it much easier to just use "x" and "y" instead of strange terms like "subtraction stories"?

I always did quite well in math, but sitting there at the back of the class messing around with stuff at the end of the book, I found that teachers tried so damn hard to make the content easier, and in the process made it harder. I could figure out how what they were saying corresponded to the material, because I already knew the material, but could not see how anyone else would understand it. Few did.

That said, "Common Core" is probably fine, as usual the implementation quality is just much more important than any particular methodology. (just like "object oriented programming" etc).

sputknick• 12 years ago

Does anyone know: is their a difference between "Common Core" the method of teaching, and "Common Core" the idea that all students across the nation should be held to one standard?

kaitai4• 12 years ago

Common Core is a set of standards (http://www.corestandards.org/Math/).

I don't think there is one official way of teaching that is "Common Core."

The texts currently labeled Common Core are mostly copy-and-paste remixes of existing material.

The exams labeled "Common Core" are unfortunately similar. They don't test the standards as written. For math, a discussion at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/11/... . Unfortunately, a theme seems to emerge of Pearson tests written to test Pearson materials, some of which have a "Common Core" label.

btilly3• 12 years ago

My children's school sent me a questionnaire on Common Core. They ended with a comment, maximum of 300 characters. Here is what I told them:

Educational reforms usually result in an ambitious curriculum being presented by underprepared teachers to unprepared students. And parents don't understand the homework and can't help.

For example, "New Math" ended with "Johnny Can't Add". I wish my kids weren't victims of the current round.

I stand by that comment. Given how many failed reforms there have been over time, how could these smart people not have predicted what has happened?

Right now we have a new set of standards. A new set of lesson plans. Every teacher has been retrained to teach in a new way. We have new homework going home with kids, which makes little sense to anyone. Kids learn to perform the operations, but do not seem to be mastering the concepts. There is an endless drum beat of positive messaging being sent home from schools. Parents that I talk to are..shall we say..less than convinced.

This is about the worst kind of big bang upgrade that you could have.

debacle4• 12 years ago

Does it help that I haven't talked to a single teacher who has been bullish on the Common Core? Many of them feel that it breaks the K-8 curriculum up in such a way that it front-loads the wrong things. Almost all of them have been derisive of what they have seen as a "cash grab" for Common Core textbooks that are riddled with errors and also somewhat awful. Many also lament that it restricts their ability to expand on aspects of the curriculum, effectively lowering their autonomy.

As a programmer, I have never seen a "one size fits all" system that can both bring up bad programmers and also provide good programmers with the autonomy they need to continue to be good programmers. Common Core is a "one size fits all" system to a much more complex problem.

barry-cotter• 12 years ago

Almost all of them have been derisive of what they have seen as a "cash grab" for Common Core textbooks that are riddled with errors and also somewhat awful.

This would be more convincing if there were some examples of good textbooks that were scrapped, or good textbooks period. The textbook procurement process in the US has been appalling for longer than most readers of this forum have been alive.[ http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm ] Never mind that the best evidence available suggests that unsccooling, i.e. providing no systematic instruction to children whatsoever leads to a delay of one year in educational outcomes. Primary school hardly seems worth it unless the point is not education but teaching children to sit down, shut up and do as they're told. [ http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232544669_The_impact... ]

nemo4• 12 years ago

Honestly if we had kept "New Math" we'd have had made life simpler for the coming generations of programmers/computer scientists. The main changes were introducing boolean algebra, matrices, other tools at a younger age, and even touched on octal and binary. It also did reduce the emphasis on arithmetic to spend time on other areas of math. This completely freaked out parents who had no understanding of the math that the kids were learning, but a lot of the response was reactionary anger at strange seeming ideas, and general anger centered on the notion that kids should only learn arithmetic by rote learning as the rest of math is pointless like the "Johnny Can't Add" book.

I have little to say about Common Core, since I haven't been following it, though I am seeing a lot of the same knee-jerk reactionary criticisms that are grounded in a sense of traditionalism and desire to focus on rote learning rather than any understanding of math, which we should be careful about.

Retra3• 12 years ago

Kids learn to perform the operations, but do not seem to be mastering the concepts.

This was already the problem. Parents didn't learn anything either, they just learned to perform the operations. If they _had_ learned the concepts, they would have no trouble understanding their kids' new homework.

btilly3• 12 years ago

If they _had_ learned the concepts, they would have no trouble understanding their kids' new homework.

Not so.

I understand the concepts perfectly well. The problem that I have is that there are multiple ways that I can map my understanding of the problem to the needlessly overcomplicated homework question in front of me. And if I can't figure out which of those ways matches what my child was taught, I can't tell my child which pointless and silly way of answering it is the "right" one.

You can object that this is opposite to the intent of the Common Core initiative. But it doesn't change the fact that this is the implementation of the Common Core initiative that my children actually have to deal with.

21echoes• 12 years ago

Kids learn to perform the operations, but do not seem to be mastering the concepts

This is explicitly what Common Core is designed to fix -- Common Core is designed to break K-12 math's traditional focus on rote arithmetic and instead focus on learning math as abstract reasoning and multiple different solution strategies.

That you would include this barb in your comment shows that you're more arguing against the concept of changing standards, and not against Common Core itself. That's not an indefensible position, and you do consistently argue from that stance throughout your comment, but I fail to see how it's constructive. The US is ranked ~30th in math worldwide -- obviously things need to be changed. Perhaps there are better ways to change our standards: what would you propose?

btilly3• 12 years ago

Common Core is designed to break K-12 math's traditional focus on rote arithmetic and instead focus on learning math as abstract reasoning and multiple different solution strategies.

The fact that it is designed to do so does not mean that it succeeds in any way. What I see is the replacement of rote arithmetic with the rote repetition of formulaic statements that are not connected to actual understanding. This is not an improvement.

I would suggest incremental improvement, not revolutionary change. The education establishment has a long history of revolutionary change, and knows exactly how to go about it. This always turns out badly. The much safer way to go is to incrementally improve, with constant feedback and repetition. It doesn't feel day by day like progress, but it has much higher odds of actually succeeding.

What our educational system has done is the equivalent of throwing out a major software system, and rolling out a new one. Such big bang upgrades seldom go well, and the larger the system the worse the disaster that follows. Even if you can wind up in a situation where success can be declared, huge amounts of damage are done.

cabinpark• 12 years ago

I think the greater problem is not with the standards (which I know nothing about) but with who is teaching it. I have talked to people who are elementary school teachers who know nothing about mathematics, yet they are given the task to teach it to children. They have little understanding of why the mathematics they teach is important and useful. If you don't give children a solid foundation in their formative years, they will always struggle with mathematics.

pm90• 12 years ago

Firstly, I would love to hear what tokenadult has to say about this.

Moving on, I think the article mentions the problem of getting good textbooks. This has always been a huge problem, I think. In India, there is a trinity of syllabi: one recommended by the Federal (Central) Govt. (CBSE), one by a consortium of private schools (ISCE) and each individual state's syllabus. So, a school does not have the independence to create its own curriculum, it has the choice of adhering to these 3 systems. It does have the independence of choosing textbooks; however, there are also officially prescribed books, and many teachers teach from them only because they cover things that are often asked in the standardized tests.

So, I don't know if it does good to have just one system, and not give schools access to more options.

duckingtest2• 12 years ago

If I were to design a school program from the ground up, I would teach programming just after reading & writing. The best way to learn math is to try to make a program that solves specific problems.

logfromblammo2• 12 years ago

The very first class I would teach would be about how to learn what you need to know in spite of what you are being taught. After that, I would teach the same class. Later, I would teach the same class again. Then again. And again. Then a sixth time. After that, I would just make the students ask a new question every day, and then answer it, instructing the teachers to throw erasers at anyone who slacks off.

The erasers are essential. The knowledge particles wiped off the greyboard are physically transferred to the student, and are then absorbed through the skin. The knowledge slowly decomposes, releasing about a microsatori of electromemetic radiation, and the waste metabolites are exhaled into the room to create an atmosphere of learning.

Needless to say, I will never be permitted to design a school program from the ground up.

EliRivers• 12 years ago

The best way to learn math is to try to make a program that solves specific problems.

An often reasonable way to ensure that you can mechanically apply a problem solving technique (which is related to, but absolutely not the same thing as understanding the maths) is to make a program that does it. Trying to learn maths by programming it is a terrible idea.

Just this morning I've been looking at Riemann's geometry; learning that through the medium of writing a program to "do it" would be painful. I don't even know what it would mean to write a program that "does" Riemann's geometry. I suppose I could write a program to apply some equations, but that's not learning the maths at all. That's automating some equation solving and it teaches me nothing about the maths.

duckingtest2• 12 years ago

An often reasonable way to ensure that you can mechanically apply a problem solving technique (which is related to, but absolutely not the same thing as understanding the maths) is to make a program that does it.

What "problem solving technique"? There's no algorithm you can mindlessly remember and use it to create algorithms. Making a program that solves the problem is the highest possible understanding.

I don't even know what it would mean to write a program that "does" Riemann's geometry

That's because it's an abstraction, not a problem to be solved. In the same way you can't write a program that 'does' functional programming, you can only program in a functional way.

Well, I guess writing an AI which can solve problems in Haskell would be an exception. I bet you couldn't remember its code and execute it in your head, though.

bane8• 12 years ago

The real problem is that Common Core tried to do several things in order to improve rankings against countries like South Korea. But instead of doing the things which high ranking countries have shown do actually produce high-level results, they put together an almost completely untested curriculum, then rolled out it out everywhere.

There's not really any evidence that the approach in Common Core will improve student's math achievement scores, and lots of evidence that it's been an abysmal failure. Instead of confused students ignoring the subject, we now have confused, frustrated, miserable students, a generation of which will now hate mathematics more than the one that came before them. The only thing CC has achieved is in alienating an entire generation of students from the critical skills of math.

The article makes the argument that the absurdity of the implementation of CC is a result of local standards overriding a national, well thought out program and that the CC creators are powerless to fix things. I call hogwash. Set up a textbook certification program: publishers have to pay some nominal fee to these guys to review the book and give it a seal of approval that "yes, this book fulfills what Common Core intends". Use that seal as a quality signal, books without the seal should be considered next to garbage and books with it are assumed to be better.

They should also have written their own reference K-12 curriculum, providing a gold-standard example of what it should look like. Publishers can license that curriculum and publish it unmodified or they can license it and add (but not subtract) chapters to handle local requirements.

That these things weren't done, on what's supposed to be a national educational reform that was "a lot of work" boggles the mind.

It reminds me of various specification-by-committee standards that are all over the tech world. They're laid out in document somewhere, with no reference implementation and no certification that some other implementation really is compliant and we end up with a decade of lost time while every developer tries desperately to get their image to line up just right in half a dozen different browser rendering engines, or get their query to work right in a dozen different SQL standard databases to work the same.

elberto34• 12 years ago

The way you improve test scores and increase America's economic competitiveness is to understand that higher IQ students will learn faster and more efficiently than lower IQ ones, and then by grouping the students accordingly. Instead of wasting billions trying to get everyone up to speed, let's devote more resources to those who demonstrate talent, while those who cannot keep up are encouraged to pursue vocational work. Hence, we see that that the problems facing our educational system cannot be lessened by throwing money at it with reckless abandon, but by better understanding human biological differences and how these not only effect learning, but economic outcomes. I don't want to make this a partisan issue, but what we observe is a leftist denial of human cognitive differences and a denial of the significance of these differences as the culprit. Better teachers, new technologies, and new curriculum can only go so far; for progress to really be made we need to stop being in denial of human biology as it pertains to IQ and learn to face these sometimes uncomfortable but inescapable realities head-on.

mzs• 12 years ago

I'm a parent and I've overall been very happy. In math it's very simple for a kid to get hung-up on one simple thing and then they have this hole and cause things build on previous knowledge later things are now trouble as well.

For example one of my children could not factor in the way I was taught with the trees, but another way was presented and it totally clicked for her. For one of my sons he could not do long division in the manner I was taught, but another method worked for him instantly. He showed me and I even liked it, cause I remembered how hung-up I had been about getting the correct digit at each step myself.

I also like how it seems to have this component about reasoning. To many people math is arithmetic, but it really is not that. The problem is that there are kids where requirements were different. So for example now a third grader is supposed to have memorized multiplication table, but there were schools that never did that before. Or a sixth grader is now already supposed to have done some geometry, but the school only did it in 8th grade or HS before. There is no route to fill in the gaps during this transition in many schools it seems.

malandrew• 12 years ago

One of the biggest problems in changing anything like this is that it requires extra effort from teaches to completely "retool".

Anyone who has ever spent anytime teaching knows that when you first start out, you have to figure out a lot of stuff when teaching a new curriculum, but by the time you've taught the material 2-3 times [0], you start streamlining things and getting more efficient. The time you spend retooling almost always comes out of your personal time. i.e. from hours beyond the 40-50 hour work week.

After you know a curriculum well, you end up with more personal time. Introducing new standards, means a new curriculum and a new curriculum means a lot of unpaid personal time from teachers if you want them to really adopt it and teach it well.

I just don't see a new curriculum working well unless it comes with the notion of paid extra-time that you know teachers will have to put in to succeed with the new curriculum. It doesn't have to be a lot, but simply 5-10 more hours each week and a bonus equal to 10-25% of their salary to make up for the additional time would probably work. The only key would be that there needs to be a way to measure that teachers are putting in the extra time to really learn the new curriculum and apply it instead of collecting the bonus for putting in the minimum effort.

At the end of the day, it you don't budget both time and money to learn any new curriculum, it's either going to fail or be met with resistance from teachers who feel like they already have a system that works for them and their students.

[0] either in the same semester or school year because you teach multiple groups the same material or after 2-3 semesters or school years of teaching the subject to one group at a time

jwmerrill3• 12 years ago

The common core Mathematics standards are available for anyone to read here:

http://www.corestandards.org/Math/

I would encourage anyone who is really interested in this issue to spend some time reading, or even skimming just a few sections. I find the standard is generally quite readable (conceding that it's a non-trivial commitment to read more than 1 grade level, but then again, there's a lot to know about math...) and I also tend to agree with many of the ideas in it.

I've been disappointed, but in hindsight not very surprised by the anti-intellectualism in the public response to the common core. I'm more surprised to see similar anti-intellectualism here. I expect better from you, HN!

It's true that the common core places more emphasis on critical, analytical, and sometimes even abstract thinking than the "traditional" math curriculum (whatever that is...). But as people who read hacker news, doesn't that sound good to you?

It's also important to know that the Common Core standards are a set of expectations, and that's actually all they are. They are not worksheets or standardized tests. If you see a bad "Common Core" worksheet, it is a bad response to the Common Core, but it isn't actually the Common Core itself. If you want to criticize the Common Core itself, choose a part of the document above and criticize it. Or failing that, criticize the process that led to its creation and dissemination. But criticizing a few oddball problems is not a powerful argument.

My own criticism-in-hindsight is that the Common Core is trying to do two things at once. Maybe it would be succeeding better if it only tried to do one of them at a time.

The first is to provide a nationally standardized set of grade level expectations. Many people have an interest in this goal because it makes it easier to prepare teaching materials for a large group of students, and to compare education effectiveness across regions. In an alternate world, this could have been done descriptively instead of prescriptively. The standards could have simply described what was happening in the largest fraction of the country's classrooms.

The second goal is to improve math pedagogy in the U.S. and bring it up to the best international standards, including tying math more strongly to critical, analytical, and abstract thinking skills. This is a prescriptive goal.

If the standard was a process, we could have started with 1, and moved to 2 incrementally. But I suggest this only half-heartedly, because I think 2 is a great goal, and I think the Common Core (as a document) does a pretty good job of it.

Now to be clear about my own biases:

I don't have any children (school age or otherwise). If my first exposure to the Common Core was seeing my child assigned problems that looked unfamiliar, unimportant, or even that I didn't know how to do, I'll concede that I might have reacted negatively too.

I do have a physics Ph.D. (i.e. math background), I do think and care a lot about how people understand math, and I do work on a software tool that tries to help children think about (part of) math more powerfully.

zaroth2• 12 years ago

The issues with Common Core as I've read are a lot bigger than a few oddball problems, or under-developed worksheets or testing. The problem is apparently instead of taking these core and mostly trivial concepts and finding ways to actually make them intuitive, in the name of "critical thinking" we've created this theater-of-the-absurd approach like what you see discussed above.

I don't have much personal exposure to "Common Core", but I've found when all the implementations turn out as shit, the blame usually lies with the specification.

My personal opinion is that a lot of this overloading on processes and bizarre approaches to presenting problems (and don't get me started on the form of homework assignments and tests) is because we're out-pacing the natural cognitive developmental process. For example, take the sample chapters that were on the front page a couple days ago from "Math from [Age] 3 to 7" [1] you can see a very interesting approach to building math skills. But even in that case, the author is rushing developmentally advanced tasks which are more likely to result in frustration and giving-up than engagement and learning.

Fundamentally, most learning does not occur while a teacher is speaking. The more absurd lengths the teacher goes to "explain" some concept, the less likely any child is to actually learn it. The more foreign the concept is by the time the kids get home, the less likely it is to be mastered.

I have a daughter in Kindergarten, but fortunately not one that follows CC. I just spent some time reading through /Math/Content/K/ on corestandards.org. Most of it is, IMO, complete trash and not at all aligned with how kids in kindergarten actually learn this shit. As a "spec" it's writing is sloppy, poorly defined, and highly ambiguous. If this is the starting point, I'm not at all surprised the resulting lesson plans are worse than nothing.

I also spent some time reading /Math/Practice and it struck me how all these things that CC is presenting as "Standards for Mathematical Practice" are not at all how children conceptualize mathematics, or cognitively approach the task of solving a math problem. Many of the stated practices are directly contrary to how children will naturally want to approach and solve a given problem, and I can imagine exactly how teachers faced with "instilling" these practices would get to exactly where we find ourselves.

[1] http://www.ams.org/bookstore/pspdf/mcl-5-prev.pdf

jwmerrill3• 12 years ago

I just spent some time reading through /Math/Content/K/ on corestandards.org. Most of it is, IMO, complete trash and not at all aligned with how kids in kindergarten actually learn this shit. As a "spec" it's writing is sloppy, poorly defined, and highly ambiguous.

I respect that you took the time to read the document, but your criticism isn't very specific. Are you bothered by the fact that it uses words that aren't appropriate for Kindergartners to describe what they should know? Or that it says what they should know, but not always how to teach it?

I think the "spec" analogy is a good one. The goal of a spec is to lay out requirements, not implementation. Same idea here, which strikes me as the right choice.

The actual expectations are to know a few things about counting, numbers, and shapes. That seems developmentally appropriate to me (admitting that I don't have much recent experience with kids this age).

What do you think Kindergartners should know?

Re: the practices part, these same practices are mentioned at every grade level through high school. I agree that the practices sound way too advanced for Kindergarteners, but the goal is to get students to do them well by the end of high school, not by the end of Kindergarten.

The Man Behind Common Core Math

Related Stories