5 ms·

My kids are experiencing Common Core in a SF bay area school. I think it's an improvement. Anecdotes from parents of older teens talk about a period of teachi

My kids are experiencing Common Core in a SF bay area school. I think it's an improvement. Anecdotes from parents of older teens talk about a period of teaching where students were encouraged to write about how they feel about something -- now they're encouraged to write evidence based essays. Some of the common core math books are terrible, but I think the publisher was terrible before common core (I'm looking at you Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). cpm.org seems much better. When I went through math in high school there wasn't as much emphasis on how you know something ... now kids have to demonstrate that they can explain it. We won't know for sure how effective these changes were until more of these kids are in the workforce, voting population, politics, etc.

rpedela 9y ago
A friend's daughter is 6 or 7 and she already intuitively understands math in certain ways, such as how to add two very large numbers in your head, that I didn't understand until college. Only one anecdote, but Common Core seems to be working for math if she is the new norm.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
sp332 9y ago
Have you seen the actual Common Core math standards? They're really not very complex. http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/Math_Standards1.pdf http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/Math_Standar... I blame the textbook makers for 90% of the weirdness. One hallmark of mathematical understanding is the ability to justify, in a way appropriate to the student's mathematical maturity, why a particular mathematical statement is true or where a mathematical rule comes from.... The student who can explain the rule understands the mathematics, and may have a better chance to succeed at a less familiar task.... Mathematical understanding and procedural skill are equally important
watwut 9y ago
Ability to express feelings is not harmful ability imo. There is nothing wrong with teachimg kids to talk and write about them. Feelings exist and matter unless you are psychopath. Too many people don't have it and rather pretend their feelings are result of some kind of rational assessment.
- ben509 9y ago
  Maybe people are saying that feelings don't matter, but a more interesting argument is that they're a sensation and it's misguided to assign them intrinsic moral import. In particular, it's unworkable to claim that if someone's feelings are hurt that another person has to modify their behavior, simply because feelings are entirely capricious. The analogy I've often used is the feeling of being cold: that you feel cold is simply a perception generated by nerve endings. It really is just in your head, but at the same time it's in your head for a reason. (In the case of cold, not dying of exposure is a fairly dramatic reason, and you might lose your job if you ignored social feelings.) So just as you would neither ignore nor get worked up over feeling cold and would just put on a jacket, often social feelings of offense and the like have some fairly practical solutions that are more obvious if you avoid moralizing them. So if kids were writing about feelings to recognize and solve problems, that would be helpful, but if it's just navel gazing, it's probably a waste of time.
  - rrauenza 9y ago
    Exactly - more importantly this is preparation for college or workforce. Your college professor or boss doesn’t care that you feel that Hemingway or Java is XYZ - they want reasons. There was a trend/fad to get kids to write by encouraging navel gazing. My son recently had an assignment like this for Homer’s Oddysey. The writing assignment requested he write a response to The Beggar and His Faithful Dog. It asked for something that was hidden in his life that no one knew about. This is a literature class not creative writing. My wife’s response was that besides being inappropriate, this isn’t even the lesson / point of the beggar and the faithful dog! Her response: >The last prompt has stymied us. Why would a teen want to write, on paper, to their teacher, to be read and graded, about something so personal that they have kept it hidden and never shared it with anyone? [literally what was asked....] In the story of the Beggar and the Faithful Dog, Odysseus isn't hiding some private character trait that makes people refuse to understand him. He's carrying out a clever ruse to see what's really happening at home and whether his wife has been faithful. It's a story about cleverness, trickery, and faithfulness. Turning that into a personal exposure of hidden feelings takes the fun and adventure out of the story - and it's a boundary violation. This isn’t common core - this is left over lessons from the previous fad.

rpedela 9y ago

A friend's daughter is 6 or 7 and she already intuitively understands math in certain ways, such as how to add two very large numbers in your head, that I didn't understand until college. Only one anecdote, but Common Core seems to be working for math if she is the new norm.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

sp332 9y ago

Have you seen the actual Common Core math standards? They're really not very complex. http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/Math_Standards1.pdf http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/Math_Standar... I blame the textbook makers for 90% of the weirdness. One hallmark of mathematical understanding is the ability to justify, in a way appropriate to the student's mathematical maturity, why a particular mathematical statement is true or where a mathematical rule comes from.... The student who can explain the rule understands the mathematics, and may have a better chance to succeed at a less familiar task.... Mathematical understanding and procedural skill are equally important

watwut 9y ago

Ability to express feelings is not harmful ability imo. There is nothing wrong with teachimg kids to talk and write about them. Feelings exist and matter unless you are psychopath. Too many people don't have it and rather pretend their feelings are result of some kind of rational assessment.

ben509 9y ago
Maybe people are saying that feelings don't matter, but a more interesting argument is that they're a sensation and it's misguided to assign them intrinsic moral import. In particular, it's unworkable to claim that if someone's feelings are hurt that another person has to modify their behavior, simply because feelings are entirely capricious. The analogy I've often used is the feeling of being cold: that you feel cold is simply a perception generated by nerve endings. It really is just in your head, but at the same time it's in your head for a reason. (In the case of cold, not dying of exposure is a fairly dramatic reason, and you might lose your job if you ignored social feelings.) So just as you would neither ignore nor get worked up over feeling cold and would just put on a jacket, often social feelings of offense and the like have some fairly practical solutions that are more obvious if you avoid moralizing them. So if kids were writing about feelings to recognize and solve problems, that would be helpful, but if it's just navel gazing, it's probably a waste of time.
- rrauenza 9y ago
  Exactly - more importantly this is preparation for college or workforce. Your college professor or boss doesn’t care that you feel that Hemingway or Java is XYZ - they want reasons. There was a trend/fad to get kids to write by encouraging navel gazing. My son recently had an assignment like this for Homer’s Oddysey. The writing assignment requested he write a response to The Beggar and His Faithful Dog. It asked for something that was hidden in his life that no one knew about. This is a literature class not creative writing. My wife’s response was that besides being inappropriate, this isn’t even the lesson / point of the beggar and the faithful dog! Her response: >The last prompt has stymied us. Why would a teen want to write, on paper, to their teacher, to be read and graded, about something so personal that they have kept it hidden and never shared it with anyone? [literally what was asked....] In the story of the Beggar and the Faithful Dog, Odysseus isn't hiding some private character trait that makes people refuse to understand him. He's carrying out a clever ruse to see what's really happening at home and whether his wife has been faithful. It's a story about cleverness, trickery, and faithfulness. Turning that into a personal exposure of hidden feelings takes the fun and adventure out of the story - and it's a boundary violation. This isn’t common core - this is left over lessons from the previous fad.