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Your claim is that math education was better before Common Core, when, as you say, not even teachers understood the fractions they needed to teach? I made no s

by btilly 4y ago

Your claim is that math education was better before Common Core, when, as you say, not even teachers understood the fractions they needed to teach? I made no such claim. To the contrary I pointed at a 50 year old book on how bad math education was, and said that there have been wave after wave of reforms since, each driven by the failures of the previous one. From this you should infer that I think math education has been broken for a very long time. Only the details of how it is broken change. Furthermore you point out the past failures of teachers to understand the fractions that they needed to teach. But you haven't said anything to indicate we should believe that it has improved since. I don't believe it has improved. Teachers STILL don't understand fractions properly. The Eureka books show how to solve the problems on the page adjacent to the homework. Eureka website has free parent resources on websites. If your teacher is sending home mystery homework, that's just a bad teacher. Classic. Just blame it on the teacher. She didn't pick the textbook, and printed out the prepared homework sets which went with the textbook. She also didn't have a choice about how much homework - that was school policy. As was not having the kids carry their textbookshome. While there were problems with the teacher, this one really can't be blamed on her. But it gets better. My son was in this course in 2012. According to https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2019/10/06/a-great-minds-common-core-inc-history-eureka-math-wit-wisdom-and-more/ https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2019/10/06/a-great-minds-com..., the contract to create that website was awarded in 2012. We would have needed access to a time travel machine to take advantage of a website that did not yet exist! (I don't remember what textbook we had, but it certainly did not then have a website associated with it.) So stop blaming the teacher, who was essentially also a victim of the system. Instead read through my explanation of why disaster was guaranteed from the start.

aidenn0 4y ago
I've said this before, but public education seems to be in a death spiral of: 1. Reduce teacher autonomy 2. A lot of the better teachers dislike this, so move on 3. Decide that the teachers remaining aren't competent enough, so reduce their autonomy 4. GOTO 2 Not being able to decide how much, and what homework to assign is beyond absurd for someone who is so least ostensibly a teacher. If you are dictating what they are doing to that detail, stop requiring a college degree and call them day-care providers.
- btilly 4y ago
  You're missing the step where Teachers College of Columbia University first hijacked the teaching profession for a specific progressive philosophy that aspired to a scientific approach to education, but went with pseudoscience around things like "learning to learn" instead. This provided fertile ground for fad after fad that later swept teaching. This created grounds to want to restrict teacher autonomy in the first place. I recently re-read To Kill a Mockingbird and was surprised to find a first hand account of what an initial encounter with this philosophy was like back in the 1930s.

by btilly 4y ago

aidenn0 4y ago

I've said this before, but public education seems to be in a death spiral of: 1. Reduce teacher autonomy 2. A lot of the better teachers dislike this, so move on 3. Decide that the teachers remaining aren't competent enough, so reduce their autonomy 4. GOTO 2 Not being able to decide how much, and what homework to assign is beyond absurd for someone who is so least ostensibly a teacher. If you are dictating what they are doing to that detail, stop requiring a college degree and call them day-care providers.

btilly 4y ago
You're missing the step where Teachers College of Columbia University first hijacked the teaching profession for a specific progressive philosophy that aspired to a scientific approach to education, but went with pseudoscience around things like "learning to learn" instead. This provided fertile ground for fad after fad that later swept teaching. This created grounds to want to restrict teacher autonomy in the first place. I recently re-read To Kill a Mockingbird and was surprised to find a first hand account of what an initial encounter with this philosophy was like back in the 1930s.