-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Gov. DeSantis announces executive order to eliminate Common Core in Florida
- Thread starter Dalek
- Start date
Are you unfamiliar with how awful the average person is at math? It's not because math is some un-tamable beast. It's because we teach it wrong.
Here's a fun history lesson -- did you know that, prior to about the 1700's, the concept of negative numbers was generally outside the general knowledge of average people? The concept of "negatives" was something only math scholars comprehended, because "how can you add less than 0 of something?" and so forth.
It takes just a slight adjustment to change a concept from something you need a degree to understand, to something that is now a fundamental and basic part of math.
Because it pushed memorization and following patterns rather than understanding what you were doing, and showing how you can manipulate numbers. Most people don't know why they do things in math, they just do the method they were shown. The way they do it now is to try to build a stronger foundation so people can actually advance more in math. To top it off, a lot of the things they teach is simply how people do math in their head now anyway.
Apparently so.
So how is it done in other countries?
Edit- IF this does make it easier to understand math for the majority of kids.. then fine that's great... but yes for this 37 year old, those examples do seem more confusing... looks to make something more complicated than it needs to be.
Again I'm all for it, if it does work for the majority of kids.
Allowing states, particularly conservative ones, to disregard national standards is not a good thing. But by all means cheer for this because it makes you feel less dumb as a parent. We will never be able to fix our education system by allowing fuckwads to govern it.
Edit
Ultimately we live in a nation of people who have poor critical thinking skills, and can't handle learning or helping their kids with new methods because it's not how they memorized how to do it. This issue is compounded by the quality of many schools being poor already. Regardless of the method, standards, etc., these issues are going to be difficult to overcome.
Edit
Ultimately we live in a nation of people who have poor critical thinking skills, and can't handle learning or helping their kids with new methods because it's not how they memorized how to do it. This issue is compounded by the quality of many schools being poor already. Regardless of the method, standards, etc., these issues are going to be difficult to overcome.
From my own experience, it does not work for the majority of kids.
I honestly don't know. I remember reading in college once, though, that language in general plays a role in how easily people pick up math, due to organizational matters relating to how our brain processes language. The article was about how asian languages may be more conducive to higher level maths because of the way their languages work and how their brains process chunks of their languages in more mechanical and consistent ways compared to things like english, which have lots and lots of irregular exceptions.
I took 4 years of japanese in college, and their language is honestly pretty modular compared to english.
Use evidence-based teaching methods that have high success rates to teach.
OP
OP
You'll notice that the majority of people cheering on this method of teaching math aren't the parents, students or teachers involved with it.
I feel like it is the responsibility of teachers to actually read the standards. After all, college education should have provided a decent amount of research skills to do so. Most teachers that I know, who spent an hour together to read and discuss the standards, end up agreeing that they are good standards. One of my friends is a math teacher in his 70s. He is old school when it comes to math. He said the math CC standards are good. It is teachers who dont even bother to read them who dont like them.
Well that's pretty cute: Asserting that I and the teachers I work with every day haven't actually read the standards. Bugger off with that.
Uh, in this very thread there are more teachers advocating for it than not.
Are you in a republican/conservative district? Republicans dont like Common Core. They made their decision about it before ever reading the standards.
This is not true. CC was an Obama reform. Same as Race to the Top.
People hate change, regardless of good or bad, if it requires learning something new.
Regardless I don't think just changing how we teach our kids will solve the wide ranging issues within our education system.
Common core has been around for a decent amount of time now, right? Is there any data on what happened to test scores and proficiency in districts that implemented it?
Yup, I have been doing it like this in my head for decades and any time I tried to explain it to people they would just look at me cross-eyed.
I hated math in general but these weird workarounds always helped me score extremely high on math portions of standardized tests.
Tests changed with the times as well. You could not compare the data from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s if they all used different tests.
My son was one of the last students to learn math under the "traditional" way. He was always good at math and it was his favorite subject. He's now taking advanced math in high school.
My daughter is a child of Common Core. She's a strong student but she always hated math - with a passion. And because it was Common Core I did struggle to help her initially. But she kept at it and now in Middle School back under a regular math curriculum, she's getting As' in math. Also on the state standardized tests, she scored in the top percentiles nearly equaling my son who is a math genius.
So I gotta give Common Core some props. My daughter who doesn't like math and has to try harder to understand it, she ended up being able to grasp more advance topics easier and excel. Maybe parents and teachers need to take a couple of night classes on Common Core math to get them up to speed.
My daughter is a child of Common Core. She's a strong student but she always hated math - with a passion. And because it was Common Core I did struggle to help her initially. But she kept at it and now in Middle School back under a regular math curriculum, she's getting As' in math. Also on the state standardized tests, she scored in the top percentiles nearly equaling my son who is a math genius.
So I gotta give Common Core some props. My daughter who doesn't like math and has to try harder to understand it, she ended up being able to grasp more advance topics easier and excel. Maybe parents and teachers need to take a couple of night classes on Common Core math to get them up to speed.
As a master of Physics (and bachelor of applied mathematics) who grew up before Common Core math lessons were a thing, this stuff seems really good and logical. A lot of what I've seen is the way I do mental math already, but had to figure out myself because math instruction was basically rote memorization and minimal lines brute force methods while I was in school.
This, my understanding was that the fancypants methods people complain about and blame on "common core" actually have nothing to do with what CC mandates and everything to do with textbooks.
Let me give an example of this -- imaginary numbers. Raise your hand ITT if you even remember imaginary numbers from school. Raise your hand if you can give a logical explaination about what they actually are, in a way that actually makes sense.
When I learned imaginary numbers, it was literally taught that i^2 = -1. That's all they fucking taught. What the hell does that mean? I know numbers, I know squares, but what does the above formula mean? I could understand that it was a contradiction, that any number times itself equates to a positive, so the above formula is demonstrating something impossible. But what is that demonstration? What does it mean? Why is that a thing?
Later in life, I read an explaination of imaginary numbers that made it make sense to me. It involved thinking about numbers not as points (literally dots) in space on a 1 dimensional plane, but rather as nth dimensional figures - literally 3D (and beyond) structures. By realizing that numbers are mutable, I could shift my perspective of a single number from a point in space, to thinking about that number as though it were a geometric (and literally visible) entity. By considering a number as an nth-dimensional object, I could apply concepts of geometry to mathematics.
So back to i^2 = -1. What is really being asked is to demonstrate an operation that, when done twice upon itself, moves from 1 to -1. Thinking about this as multiplication among two one-dimensional points in space, there is no operation that can do that. But in 2 or 3 or 4 or n dimensions? It's actually doable! In 1 dimensions, that number is on a single axis number line. But if we mutate our number to a 2 dimensional X/Y axis like so:
The black and white lines are X and Y axises. The red dot is a point at "1" on the X axis. We want an operation that will take that point from there, to here:
To -1 on the X axis. We first do this by changing our perception of the number "1" from a number, to a vector -- a vector being the motion from 0 to 1 in this case, like so:
Now what operation done twice will change our motion from 0 to 1, to 0 to -1? The answer is a 90 degree rotation along the Y axis:
one rotation:
Two rotations:
What is "i" in "i^2"? It's a geometric rotation along 1 extra dimension beyond the dimension you are working on. Why is this called an "imaginary" number? Well, I think that's a stupid name, for one, but the idea is that on one rotation, that motion we described was entirely on the Y axis and not on the X axis at all. Thus from our perspective from the X axis, that one rotation is undefined, it is "imaginary," it is not real for that dimension.
If you keep up with the definition of i, you learn that i = undefined, i^2 = -1, i^3 = undefined, i^4 = 1, i^5 = undefined, i^6 = -1, i^7 = undefined, i^8 = 1, etc. Its describing a counter clockwise rotation along the next dimension.
Now, this is probably meaningless beyond a nice mind blow in average discussion, but this sort of math is what enables things like aviation. There exists a mathematical flaw with the way we as humans normally calculate 3D space. It's easiest for people to break the components of a 3D transformation down into 3 cumulative rotations - XYZ, YXZ, ZXY, etc. That means, to describe a point in space, you can logically do so by describing the X rotation offset first, then the Y rotation offset, then the Z rotation offset. This makes each rotation offset a determinant of the rotations that come after. If you are expressing singluar points in 3D space, this isn't a problem, but once you get into describing motion in 3D space, you run into a problem called gimbal lock where specific rotations along specific axsies depending on the order of rotations will cancel out an entire axis. This, for literally hundreds upon hundreds of years, prevented people from accurately calculating 3D motion, until this dude in the 1700's discovered that you can perfectly describe 3D motion by using 4D calculations -- called quaternions. The secret to being able to understand how to calculate quaternions comes from you understanding what imaginary numbers are. If you only had an academic understanding of how to calculate an imaginary number, quaternions wouldn't make any logical sense to you, But once you actually understand visually what they are describing, you can comprehend what a quaternion is doing pretty easily.
The thing though is, Common Core is just a goal of what you need to know. How it's taught will vary by school districts as each adopts a different curriculum. Also it's clear that the material given to parents isn't equal in all school districts either. I'm not even sure if the tests are standard so looking at the data is going to vary depending on how things were implemented and tested.
I tutor my niece in math for my sister, who is a teacher. She pays me for math lessons twice a week. We've been doing this for 2 years now.
Ecsuse your university expects each student to already know the principles of math, thus, simplifying it doesn't take away the understanding of how you got to your answer. 3rd graders actually need to understand not just the answer but why the answer is what it is. So yes, things will be a bit more complicated.
OK I get that, but my state at least (California) tests for proficiency in math and reading and you can see the results year by year, school by school. Even if the tests change year by year, the results should be improving if a school's particular change is working, right?
Otherwise how in the world are we supposed to know if this is actually working?
the benefits of this type of education can't be felt in a single year to year, or even multiple years of examination. It's a change that will manifest when the person is at the end of their formal education, like leaving college, and how they use it in their lives, because the change will be their overall grasp of mathematics as a society. It's a macro change, not a micro change.
This hasn't been around long enough to bare those kinds of fruits. It'll be literally a generational change.
The best way to know if teaching methodology is working is by reading up on University educational research studies, that are peer reviewed, and do qualitative data analysis throughout many years. Just reading test scores from some company is a bullshit measure and people really need to get over those results.
Again
Common core are standards.
Standards tell you WHAT to teach.
As in "students should be able to divide within 100".
Common core is the skeleton that you put the meat of the school curriculum onto. Then unit plans and lesson plans are created that do the actual HOW.
If there are problems with the way things are taught, the problems lie with the way the standards are being implemented. Not with the standards themselves. People, even many teachers apparently, seem to be putting their anger towards the wrong culprit.
Common core isnt to blame.
Common core's job is to make sure children across the country are learning the same general information so that kids in Arkansas are learning about force and motion at the same time kids in California are. And that when those kids move up to the next grade level they arent being taught things they lack the scaffolding to understand (trying to learn multiplication before addition) or repeating things already covered.
Common core are standards.
Standards tell you WHAT to teach.
As in "students should be able to divide within 100".
Common core is the skeleton that you put the meat of the school curriculum onto. Then unit plans and lesson plans are created that do the actual HOW.
If there are problems with the way things are taught, the problems lie with the way the standards are being implemented. Not with the standards themselves. People, even many teachers apparently, seem to be putting their anger towards the wrong culprit.
Common core isnt to blame.
Common core's job is to make sure children across the country are learning the same general information so that kids in Arkansas are learning about force and motion at the same time kids in California are. And that when those kids move up to the next grade level they arent being taught things they lack the scaffolding to understand (trying to learn multiplication before addition) or repeating things already covered.
I would bet money that this problem is part of a sequence of problems explaining the entire mathmatical computation. The problem is probably completely taken out of context and if we looked at the entire set of questions we'd all agree this is a good and proper way to learn math.
Anytime a Republican says he wants schools to teach 'civics' I become immediately wary. Sure did a bang-up job both-sidesing evolution science.
"Good morning class this is the headmaster, I would like to introduce your new civics teacher, Mr Oliver North"
"Good morning class this is the headmaster, I would like to introduce your new civics teacher, Mr Oliver North"
I was always getting points taken off in school for this. I could do math in my head because of a system of my own devise, but there was no "work" to show because it was visual.
Was there any kind of testing or studies done to determine that this will create the results that you're predicting, before implementing it live?
Well, I found this result for CA.
Thanks for finding this, it looks like something is definitely causing a slight uptick in scores. Those are still pretty abysmal though, yikes.
And I hope nobody thinks that I'm advocating against common core, or saying that it does or doesn't cause better proficiency, or whatever. I'm honestly just trying to learn about all of this from the results standpoint, beyond individual teachers saying that they love it or hate it.
Yes, quite literally I described a study funded by NASA at my magnet school when I was young.
edit: To clarify, I don't know the results of those studies. I'm just saying I remember them running an actual study using my school as a testing grounds when I was a kid, so I know at least studies were conducted. From my anecdotal experience, while I myself didn't go through that specific study, my friends who did actually did successfully pick up Calculus astonishingly early.
Last edited:
I'm a parent. My daughter has a learning disability...as I did. I would get math problems correct but I'd get the answer in a very different way. I was criticized for it when trying to show my work. My daughter figures things out as I did but with little to no stigmatism because the curriculum encourages finding ways to solve the problem rather than just telling the answer.
CC requires students to learn how 10s place and 1s place work and how it interacts with other math facts. To all the people who keep saying CC is just the standard, they are only partly correct but missing the brilliance of CC. the standards now require understanding of how math principles work and not the brute force answer. The material is a reflection in this fundamental change in how we teach and learn math.
Do you have the data on that? Sorry I missed it, but the post I found seemed to just say that kids who were chosen for a certain program all did well with calculus and you were surprised by it. How were they chosen? How were kids at your school chosen to go there in the first place? I'd be interested in seeing the actual study.
I'm not challenging your story, I'm just looking for information. I'm a parent at the stage of starting to choose schools and the entire education path for my kids, so I'm just trying to absorb as much info as possible.
Exactly. I was actually kind of jealous of kids that had the opportunity to learn common core math. I seems like the natural evolution of how math should be taught.
When someone showed me how common core works, I was impressed because it gives you the ability to understand the question, solve it in a way that works for you, and solve it faster, particularly at a younger age.
Yes I agree, however its important to note the change in the way we teach math is not "common core math" its modern math that found a way to enter the US mainstream through common core. It might sound like semantics but it's an important distinction because some people's inability to accept or understand this type of math is used as ammo to get rid of common core and return to individual state standards which let gop controlled local governments mutilate what children are taught.
Parents really need to redirect their anger toward Pearson. Unfortunately, Pearon likely has politicians in their pockets.
Have you ever helped a kid with homework? Its not as simple as the kid brings home the sheet, you look at it and because you are an adult you immediately understand the concepts, and you move straight into helping them.
The child has spent all day in a classroom going over this new math concept with the teacher giving them real life examples to help the point reach home. The child comes home to the parent asking for help because even though they spent a considerate amount of time in class going over the concepts they still dont understand them. So now you as a parent are confronted with a piece of homework covering concepts you have no frame of reference for so instead of going directly into helping your kid do their work you need to go through the chapter (in a book that does a poor job of explaining the concepts alone), learn exactly what the hell is going on, and try to teach your kid how to complete math problems using concepts you yourself have a shaky grasp of because you just realized they exist 20 minutes ago. Oh keep in mind that because you are an adult you have things to do other than learn math like cook dinner, give the kids a bath, clean, etc...after you are already dog tired from a full day of work.
I just added an edit right before you posted, sorry for not including it earlier.
The program was three tiered and was called Alpha and later on WAVE. It began in kindergarten at the recommendation of your teacher, kids who showed signs of being "gifted" were accepted into an early test program till the 2nd grade. That program would replace 2 out of the 5 days a week with special classes where we did things like logic puzzles and such. Every few months, we were given exams that determined if we stayed or got shuffled out of the program. After 2 years, we were officially in and went to an entirely different school. Some of it was held at Johnson Space Center, and some if was held at the University of Houston in Clear Lake. We were allowed to take 6 week electives, where our schooling would be replaced with these concentrated classes on subjects we chose. Sort of like highschool and such with electives, but with one single class. When you made it to middle school, the program became WAVE and we took multiple electives each day on subjects we were interested in. There were also special studies that you could be recommended for that had outside funding, where people within the program were randomly selected. So like my friends would get a notification that they could take a sponsored math elective for the next 6 weeks if they chose to do so. If they declined, they'd move down the list to the next kid they'd randomly chosen. So it wasn't based on aptitude.
I really wish I had been selected for that.
Did you actually read the article beyond the headline and the example? It literally states why math is being taught this way, and that it's actually teaching kids more than the rote memorization we were fed in school.
From what I've seen, I like the Common Core methods (makes basic math much easier when it clicks), but have found some of the initial explanations confusing when shown examples.
Also, I feel like it may not mesh well with the traditional pacing and grading of typical U.S. schools? Any of you teachers found this to be the case?
Also, I feel like it may not mesh well with the traditional pacing and grading of typical U.S. schools? Any of you teachers found this to be the case?
This should help you:
https://www.caschooldashboard.org/
Also, look here for the school rating:
https://www.greatschools.org/
