Do you love or hate Common Core?

Was there ever any question that greed is behind textbooks? One of mine for grad school was four hundred goddamn dollars! Two hundred bucks was pretty normal. You figure five classes a semester at an average of 1.2 books required for each at an average cost of $190 that’s like $2500 in just books per year for college.

I have grandchildren that I work with occasionally but I don’t have to deal with it too much.

I think the concept of having a common goal for the children of the US is a good one. I don’t think the actual execution of this particular attempt is that successful. I have a problem with teaching to a test and not teaching how to come to an answer.

I’ve looked into Common Core so much and I’m still confused by it.

Common core as a guideline for a progression of learning throughout grade schools I think is helpful for students and teachers (especially new ones). Requiring teachers to teach specific methods and use specific textbooks, not so much. Teaching is an art.

Common core should not have to be as rigid as it is. In Providence, RI, there is practically no wiggle room. You have to be on page 184 of the text on January 12th at 12:53pm or else you face the administrators. (That last sentence was an exaggeration for those who can’t read between the lines.) The most convincing argument I’ve heard in favor of this was that families often move frequently throughout Providence without regards to their children’s education, so they are making it easier for the children to transfer by having all schools on the same page at all times. My argument is that they’re attacking the wrong entity and it has even more serious reprocussions.

Exploitation is involved in almost everything here in the USA. A common euphemism for this phenomenon is “capitalism”. It’s no surprise to me that it happens all over in education as well.

Last year was the first year my daughter’s school began using common core. She was in fifth grade. She does very well in school and enjoyed math until common core began. It was the first year she ever struggled in school and she began to despise math. Even her brothers and father who excel in math had trouble helping her with her homework. We had many nights when she was in tears. Our family hates it.

@dammitjanetfromvegas There have been so many times when I’ve tried to help people (mostly middle-schoolers) with their homework, but couldn’t figure out how they were learning it. Like, even after reading the chapter that explains their method, I was still perplexed.

When I did student teaching last semester, I had to teach 3rd graders about multiplication properties. They were using NYS common core (but we were in Massachusetts), which used arrays for multiplication. I had to teach myself their method of arrays, and eventually understood it. It seemed like they were understanding it and getting something out of the arrays. It’s common sense, visual, and at least better than how I learned—memorization of tables and timed, competitive “beat-the-clock” tests. It was cool cause you could have a 3×7 array, and then flip it sideways to a 7×3 array to show 3×7=7×3=21. Commutative property in visual form. I loved it.

What I’m trying to say is that people learn things differently. A big part of that ed class I was in was about allowing students to use many different methods and not just one. Another way that the students learned to solve multiplication problems was by skip counting. That is, 3×7 means skip count by 3 seven times. (3,6,9,12,15,18,21). I sure hope your daughter is at least not being tripped up on the textbook methods. What exactly is it that she now hates? I’m not asking because I’m skeptical (given how schools are now, I actually believe her if anything) I’m asking so I can better understand students.

Wait a second. This question is missing the point, and frankly I find absolutely no satisfaction in Barrow being fired for simply saying out loud what the rest of us certainly all assumed. Does anyone seriously believe that things will improve with her “out of the way”? Publishing is a business and they want to sell books. Oil lobby, prison lobby, gun lobby, what do you expect?

And there’s little point in faulting another program co-opted by money making interests to the detriment of the country. Just take a look at ethanol. People are desperate and floundering for remedies to the dumbing down of the country. The underlying truth is that there are systemic reasons for the educational embarrassments afflicting us, one of them being that there is substantial profit to be realized from a nation of dummies.

@dxs we did cheat with my grandaughter, we spent the summer memorizing multiplication tables. Her math scores have improved overall since she did so and she can complete her homework quicker. The downside is then going back and having to provide proof that they accept to get the answer. The upside is that she knows what the answer is that she is trying to reach.

@dxs, by “arrays” do you mean (in this case) a grid of, say, 12×12 squares, with rows and columns each numbered from 1 to 12, and multiples in the boxes, so that you can read 3 across and 7 down, or 7 across and 3 down, and get 21 both times?

If so, that’s what we called the times table. I was taught from a grid like that in third grade, which was before Sputnik. I don’t honestly see how it could be improved upon.

@Jeruba No, I mean basically a rectangle (could also be a uniform collection dots, apples, etc.) with the lengths as the factors. So, draw a rectangle that is 7 units by 3 units. Then flip it. You can draw many other types, of course, like a 4×5 rectangle, or a 1×8 rectangle. A 6×6 rectangle would be a square. These are what we use to teach the concept of multiplication. I believe the idea was built off of skip counting.

Here’s a link to one of the lesson plans we followed. You can see some arrays on page 1.E.27. Note: we also had a difficult time understanding the lesson plan.

I had that times table in 3rd grade, too. And this was the early 2000s.

@stanleybmanly Barrow was a top rep executive for this publisher and for her to be video taped saying “I don’t like kids I hate kids” while representing a company who a big part of what they publish and sell depends on kids is the problem I am sure they had with her. And yes corporations are in the business to make profits and as much as they can. When they are directly benefiting from Federally directed programs is where I will always have a problem as you can be sure the cost to taxpayers will be a high as they can squeeze it.

@dxs – Legos make great arrays.

Hate is not a strong enough word.

@dxs, how is that any different from a subset of the multiplication table?—just a section reproduced as the whole? Did you look at the one I linked?

@Jeruba Yes I looked at the one you linked. Did you see my personal comment about it in my last quip?
It depends on how its being used. A table is just a while bunch of data to be analyzed. It is an array, but not one that is being used in the way I am trying to explain. You’re not using x and y points to locate a value, there are no filled in products of these x and y values anyway, and there is no rote memorization. You are using the rows and columns (“sides”) for multiplication.

Neither love nor hate.

It’s better than No Child Left Behind.

But it’s not perfect.

I like the idea of some national minimums in education.

From what I have heard about the math I’m not happy about it, especially for very young ages. It seems to me they are incorporating a lot of words into the math, and then calculating math in a different way than 40+ years ago.

Having an alternate way to calculate is not necessarily a bad thing. A child can choose what makes more sense to them. I do think we need to have a class for the parents so they can help their kids.

Back to all these word problems at really young ages. I personally enjoyed math, and was good at it in my youth. My reading was very average, my comprehension struggled a little. If I had had to deal with wordy problems every time I looked at a math problem, I would have hated math, hated school more than I already did, and had one less subject I did well in.

I went through Business Calculus in college (not required, my choice) and also Finance and Statistics. Math was one of the few subjects I didn’t mind working at. Reading a book I hated to do, working on a sheet of math problems was no problem.

My personal feeling and guess is most people at the top of K-12 education are not math people. They didn’t take calculus, they aren’t engineers, or scientists, they liked English class and history, and don’t understand the mind of children who hate to read or excel in math at early ages.

Sure, plenty of people who live literature and history and grammar also have a string math aptitude, but I have my doubts that a big percentage of those people are making curriculum decisions for second graders.

I would assume, or at least hope, that this common core curriculum was tested in a few communities it states before rolling it out to the nation. Was it? Are we requiring these standards without testing them for results on a smaller sample of kids?

I have a friend who is a teacher, who thinks common core is great. Most parents I know, they don’t like it and feel frustrated.

On the other hand, arithmetic was torture for me, and I loved word problems.

Common core math is easy to figure out of you take a minute to stop freaking out and look at what’s being done. 9 times out of 10 it’s just mental math being written out. We do it in our heads every day, were just not used to seeing it on paper.

@Seek That’s why I am in favor if showing multiple options for how to calculate a problem. Although, making a problem less wordy or not is actually a totally different problem I guess.

Also, what you wrote supports my point that maybe the schools should have a teach the parent day once in a while to help them understand the math.

I’m very curious if common cure is producing kids with more math abilities, and more interest in math, and more kids moving on to advanced math. I’m completely open to whatever the results are.

I don’t think you were ever going to be an engineer, even if high school math had been easier for you. I want to make sure the kid who would have gone that direction isn’t now discouraged.

From my understanding of the common core math program, it teaches the students the same method that is used to calculate the answer without pen or paper. If it helps them to be able to solve or estimate problems in their head and to understand math, versus rote memorization, all the better.

As far as the greed of textbook publishers, that existed long before common core and will continue even if the core is abandoned. One of the publishers controls over 50% of sales in the US. They don’t really care what version of math is taught, as long as they can sell you a book.

@Seek I once read something from this new textbook about how they taught subtraction. They’d subtract, say, 326 from 437. The way they taught it looked really difficult. It had them counting the hundred’s place, and then the tens place, then the ones. Seven or eight steps later, the answer was found—111. It looked overwhelming. I couldn’t imagine how some student could follow along and not lose interest by step 3. Then I realized it is exactly what I did for subtraction, but explained in a very elaborate, confusing way. The whole thing felt like a waste of words.

Math is better off not being taught by writing. Trying to put math symbols that don’t follow line-by-line styling in a textbook, combining them with English words, and developing your own personalized, often perplexingly pedantic notation are all reasons why math textbooks fail. Even in some college-level math classes, I would read about the topic we’d be learning about in the next lecture, and couldn’t understand it. Then, I’d go to class and have no problems understanding my professor. After learning about the topic, I’d go back and reread the chapter on it, and it’d all make sense now. I went through at least two college-level math classes without using the textbook.

So, I think the best place for a textbook in schools is for an additional reference. Use it to review what the teacher talked about when the teacher’s not around, and use it for practice problems.

You know, I also kind of suck at reading.

I have an integral calc book from 1898. There are literally just a handful of words contained in the whole thing. I have a feeling those students learned it very well