5 ms·

What's wrong with common core?

mywittyname 4y ago
Most of the hate seems to stem from the changes in mathematics teaching. Instead of focusing on rote memorization, the curriculum wants students to understand the concepts, thus it teaches more ways to tackle a smaller pool of topics. I believe this idea comes from the way that mathematics is taught in countries whose students outperform Americans. A friend of mine who was schooled in eastern Asia claims his daughter is learning the same methods he did growing up. FWIW, I learned some cool techniques that I didn't know about when my friend showed me his daughter's homework. But I can see how parents of fifth graders who aren't able to help their kids with their homework because they don't understand it / never learned that way would be angry. States all had their own standards, which were largely the same, but just kind of different enough. Prior to Common Core, private companies sprang up to fill the need of mapping all of the different state standards to a common standard.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Modern "teaching" practices are just pretending to teach concepts; they're mostly based on the expectation that the students will somehow "rediscover" everything on their own. You can't truly understand concepts without doing quite a bit of solid practice. Many teachers will fail to provide the needed guidance, if only because they often never properly learned the subject themselves; and "Common Core" ends up being used as an excuse for substandard teaching.
  - comte7092 4y ago
    In the past, teachers would just hand out endless worksheets to drill students. I don’t see how that is any less of an excuse for substandard teaching.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      Well, if we're going to have substandard teaching either way, let's pick the kind that actually works. Drill baby drill.
yamtaddle 4y ago
It could be worse but one thing that constantly bothers me is the stupid new vocabulary. One of the worst examples: "number sentence". It means what you, an adult, might guess it does (well, it means one of the things you might guess it means) but why use it at all? They introduce it before the kids have a decent idea of what a normal sentence (what, a "word sentence", I suppose?) is. Many of the symbols in them aren't numbers (+, -, =). They don't really act like sentences or serve the same purpose. It's misleading as hell and the kids don't even have the context that might, even hypothetically, make it useful for scaffolding, when they introduce it in kindergarten. They do this for lots of stuff. There's a whole Common Core Math jargon the motivation for which I just can't grasp. Also, much of the approach is effectively what you do with kids who are struggling in math—you shower them with techniques and explanations for the same thing, hoping one will stick. The "show 5 different ways how you could have solved this" worksheets drive gifted kids, at least, batty, and that's most of the work. "I fucking solved it, I've already shown you a hundred times I understand this other technique (which I'll never use because I also know several better ones), why are you still bothering me?" They'll have them do two problems with all that extra stuff, in the time and space the kids could have practiced ten problems. It's making my kids hate math in early elementary. Wonderful. Just wonderful. [EDIT] To illustrate by example why I find "number sentence" in particular so deeply stupid: would anyone think a good approach to introducing sentences to very young children, in language classes, might be to label them "word equations" or "word formulas" or "word algorithms" or anything like that? Would anyone think that would be an improvement? God no, it's plainly a bad idea—but that's exactly what someone, somewhere, decided to do, in reverse.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  "Number sentence" does not appear in the common core standards. https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Standards_and_Positions/Common_Core_State_Standards/Math_Standards.pdf https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Standards_and_Positions/C...
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    The standard matters not at all. What matters is what students and parents end up seeing.
mrguyorama 4y ago
Most people's complaints stem from assuming their local schools implementation of common core, and who they purchased the teaching materials from === "Common Core" There are some SERIOUSLY garbage work books available for common core curricula. Some of them are obviously trying to touch on the understand that common core is trying to push, but seemingly written by someone who never understood that concept themselves, so they are basically nonsense word salad. I remember when I was a kid, our state pushed a different direction in math education about helping students understand how to turn situations and problems into a mathematical equation to solve. Local parents decried the situation as "New Math" (importantly this stuff was distinct from the actual 70s era "New Math"), and that it was terrible and blah blah blah the same thing that happens any time you have poorly educated parents struggling to understand their children's educational material. Of course, we children did absurdly well in education terms, literally a stand-out class of students in terms of educational outcomes, maturity, flexibility, and standardized test scores. Unfortunately it would be difficult to tell what the heck caused the improvement because there were MANY weird things to happen to my class (we were called the "Guinea pig class", we had second language schooling from first grade, our middle school scheduling was changed up to give us more specialized teachers and more classroom variety, and we always got brand new curricula to test out, along with just plain notable demographic changes happening in the area at the time)

Most of the hate seems to stem from the changes in mathematics teaching. Instead of focusing on rote memorization, the curriculum wants students to understand the concepts, thus it teaches more ways to tackle a smaller pool of topics. I believe this idea comes from the way that mathematics is taught in countries whose students outperform Americans. A friend of mine who was schooled in eastern Asia claims his daughter is learning the same methods he did growing up. FWIW, I learned some cool techniques that I didn't know about when my friend showed me his daughter's homework. But I can see how parents of fifth graders who aren't able to help their kids with their homework because they don't understand it / never learned that way would be angry. States all had their own standards, which were largely the same, but just kind of different enough. Prior to Common Core, private companies sprang up to fill the need of mapping all of the different state standards to a common standard.

zozbot234 4y ago
Modern "teaching" practices are just pretending to teach concepts; they're mostly based on the expectation that the students will somehow "rediscover" everything on their own. You can't truly understand concepts without doing quite a bit of solid practice. Many teachers will fail to provide the needed guidance, if only because they often never properly learned the subject themselves; and "Common Core" ends up being used as an excuse for substandard teaching.
- comte7092 4y ago
  In the past, teachers would just hand out endless worksheets to drill students. I don’t see how that is any less of an excuse for substandard teaching.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Well, if we're going to have substandard teaching either way, let's pick the kind that actually works. Drill baby drill.

yamtaddle 4y ago

It could be worse but one thing that constantly bothers me is the stupid new vocabulary. One of the worst examples: "number sentence". It means what you, an adult, might guess it does (well, it means one of the things you might guess it means) but why use it at all? They introduce it before the kids have a decent idea of what a normal sentence (what, a "word sentence", I suppose?) is. Many of the symbols in them aren't numbers (+, -, =). They don't really act like sentences or serve the same purpose. It's misleading as hell and the kids don't even have the context that might, even hypothetically, make it useful for scaffolding, when they introduce it in kindergarten. They do this for lots of stuff. There's a whole Common Core Math jargon the motivation for which I just can't grasp. Also, much of the approach is effectively what you do with kids who are struggling in math—you shower them with techniques and explanations for the same thing, hoping one will stick. The "show 5 different ways how you could have solved this" worksheets drive gifted kids, at least, batty, and that's most of the work. "I fucking solved it, I've already shown you a hundred times I understand this other technique (which I'll never use because I also know several better ones), why are you still bothering me?" They'll have them do two problems with all that extra stuff, in the time and space the kids could have practiced ten problems. It's making my kids hate math in early elementary. Wonderful. Just wonderful. [EDIT] To illustrate by example why I find "number sentence" in particular so deeply stupid: would anyone think a good approach to introducing sentences to very young children, in language classes, might be to label them "word equations" or "word formulas" or "word algorithms" or anything like that? Would anyone think that would be an improvement? God no, it's plainly a bad idea—but that's exactly what someone, somewhere, decided to do, in reverse.

lern_too_spel 4y ago
"Number sentence" does not appear in the common core standards. https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Standards_and_Positions/Common_Core_State_Standards/Math_Standards.pdf https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Standards_and_Positions/C...
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The standard matters not at all. What matters is what students and parents end up seeing.

mrguyorama 4y ago

Most people's complaints stem from assuming their local schools implementation of common core, and who they purchased the teaching materials from === "Common Core" There are some SERIOUSLY garbage work books available for common core curricula. Some of them are obviously trying to touch on the understand that common core is trying to push, but seemingly written by someone who never understood that concept themselves, so they are basically nonsense word salad. I remember when I was a kid, our state pushed a different direction in math education about helping students understand how to turn situations and problems into a mathematical equation to solve. Local parents decried the situation as "New Math" (importantly this stuff was distinct from the actual 70s era "New Math"), and that it was terrible and blah blah blah the same thing that happens any time you have poorly educated parents struggling to understand their children's educational material. Of course, we children did absurdly well in education terms, literally a stand-out class of students in terms of educational outcomes, maturity, flexibility, and standardized test scores. Unfortunately it would be difficult to tell what the heck caused the improvement because there were MANY weird things to happen to my class (we were called the "Guinea pig class", we had second language schooling from first grade, our middle school scheduling was changed up to give us more specialized teachers and more classroom variety, and we always got brand new curricula to test out, along with just plain notable demographic changes happening in the area at the time)