> By "common core methods", I'm lumping together a bunch of approaches where, in the words of the immortal Tom Lehrer, "the important thing is to understand wha

> By "common core methods", I'm lumping together a bunch of approaches where, in the words of the immortal Tom Lehrer, "the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer". Well, maybe that's really misdirected then, isn't it? Because the actual Common Core standards aren't really behind your complaints. I don't really agree with the rest of what you say, though. Rote and math drilling are very important, but understanding is pretty important so you know what method to select. IMO, a good math class is 1/3rd rote, 1/3rd intuition/pictures, and 1/3rd efforts to add rigor. It's worth noting the whole lot of the world introduces pictures and geometric methods early, like some of these curriculums are trying to do, and gets better results in math education than we have. Though I don't really think most US teachers know how to do that well, yet. > Understanding what you're doing is important. Understanding what you're doing on the way to getting the wrong answer is not really, unless your goal is to get the wrong answer. Everyone wants the right answer. A huge proportion of our population basically gives up on math at some point from 4th to 7th grade; they decide they're bad at it, and this self-assessment is more predictive of their future performance than their actual performance. This is really a general pedagogical thing rather than being rooted in standards or even curriculum, but a lot of the reason some teachers and programs are trying to celebrate partial success is to reduce this problem. The background trend is particularly harmful to girls, who for a variety of reasons tend to self-assess more harshly than boys. In any case, this all has very little to do with Common Core, other than it started happening in the same decade. (Buying new textbooks to align with a new standard is a good chance to change things.) And it's really confusing to those of us with some domain knowledge who can't figure out the specific, non-CC reason why a particular person is complaining. My background: I advise on math curriculum selection and development at a small private school; I coach a competitive MS math team that routinely wins (crushes— we are 4% of the local MS pop but had 8/12 of the top students last year) regional competition despite us being tiny. Our elementary school that feeds us adopted visual and explanatory methods early, and devoted a whole lot of effort at getting good at teaching this way. (Note, we didn't abandon rote practice. Also note that we are not really required to align with state standards, but for math we could do so with very little change). We get a huge proportion of our student body through AP Calc; my eldest did it in 8th grade.