> My personal opinion is that CC is perhaps better at teaching basic math skills to the bottom 50% and is less likely to lose students along the way, but at the

> My personal opinion is that CC is perhaps better at teaching basic math skills to the bottom 50% and is less likely to lose students along the way, but at the cost of holding back the top 50% of students approximately 1 full grade-level by the time they graduate high school. From my limited sample sized poll students see the new methods as being just as ridiculous as parents see them. This is an issue that would occur regardless of CC, I believe. Unless you can differentiate them into separate classes fairly early, and are constantly checking to see if everyone is in the correct group (for instance, I have several students who are labeled as gifted in math who can't do simple addition without a calculator... they were listed as gifted in third grade, and then never tested again), one of the two is always going to suffer. Either you help the higher level kids at the expense of the lower, or the lower at the expense of the higher. As for 'students see the new methods as being...' it's because they just mimic how their parents see them. Now, I don't teach elementary school so I don't know what they do, but reading comments here it seems they basically teach students how numbers work. And that's a good thing. I have high school students who didn't know that to multiply a number by 15, you could multiply it by 10 and by 5 then add the results. Along the same lines, they didn't know you could multiply by 10 then divide by 2 (or divide by 2 then multiply by 10) to get multiplication by 5. And this impacts them a lot more when we discuss variables and polynomials (which is mostly what Algebra II should be). They have no concept of how numbers work, so they don't understand why x^3/x = x^2.