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Gates Foundation admits Common Core Mistake. What now?

This video describes the main common core math hoax:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r40ZRax6lxg

The hoax is that Gates' committee had to find some difference between the present math pedagogy and the as-yet unwritten common core approach.

We taught that 10 is the number one unit larger than nine. We did not introduce the concept of "tens" vs. "ones" in second grade for Christ's sake. The only two mathematicians on the validation committee voted no on this and produce protest videos now on how developmentally inappropriate it is.

The education degrees on the committee were the ones who came up with this. None of them had degrees in math.

Now textbooks have been written, computer software programs produced, and teachers trained in this idiotic developmentally inappropriate approach to counting numbers.

The Asians use an abacus. It is the same thing as counting on your fingers. And they are kicking our ass in mathematics.

Now that Bill Gates and the federal government have abandoned you and left you with these texts, computer curricula and so forth - what are you going to do? Billions upon billions have been spent putting this in place and the ship is adrift.

One of the effects of this bad pedagogy is to stress the kids out. They don't understand it so it causes all kinds of physical manifestations of stress.

It is a malicious, manipulative lie to say kids do not "understand" what 5 + 8 is until they learn base 10 math formally. This lie was designed to justify making some arbitrary change to math pedagogy. To be seen as "doing something". So they made this up, thinking that most people are going to be too stupid to understand it is a con job. I do not believe a single member of the math committee actually buys their own propaganda about how this means you "understand" better.

The states adopting Common Core, the parents and teachers, had no idea this was coming. The educational bureaucracies accepted grant money with strings attached. ESSA removed those strings.

You do not have to teach math this way in order to get federal money now. You are not compelled to adopt textbooks that teach it this way. You do not have to mark students wrong when they say 13 but do not see it as one group of tens and another group of ones.

So are you going to keep teaching math this way?
 
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Argumemnon said:
Isn't math all about memorising?
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Yes, exactly.

That is why memorizing that ten is one unit of tens and one unit of ones is developmentally inappropriate when you are learning to count.

You can count to 100 just fine without being forced to memorize anything about "tens" vs. "ones".

The bizarre thing about the math standards is that in the beginning they force this developmentally inappropriate memorization upon students but at the upper end they have actually lowered standards. Algebra II for high school diploma.

That is not college ready. It is remedial math ready. 2% of college students who enroll in STEM programs but have to take exactly this kind of remedial math fail to obtain their degree.

So it is a 98% college not-ready standard. Massachusetts requires Algebra beginning in 8th grade. States that want quality education programs need to wake up to the fact they have been abandoned.

A big tornado flew through the country called Common Core and it then vanished, leaving a wake behind it of bewildered states. Nobody has to adhere to it now. No money is contingent on it. The money power behind it has quit.

So what now?
 
AlaskaBushPilot said:
That is why memorizing that ten is one unit of tens and one unit of ones is developmentally inappropriate when you are learning to count.
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It's also incorrect. One unit of tens and one unit of ones would be eleven.

This aspect of common core seems natural and useful to me.
 
marplots said:
It's also incorrect. One unit of tens and one unit of ones would be eleven.
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Yes, happily corrected.

This aspect of common core seems natural and useful to me.
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and you are just saying that to be purposefully argumentative. I have enough experience watching how you post to understand this about you.

Generally, what you do is invent some kind of "contra" comment. You are probably female. Conversation is more like ping pong, no logical or rational thought need be attached.

You don't believe it to be natural nor do you think it useful. Were that the case, you would have been able to explain why. You can't. But go ahead and try.

Just as you said before that this somehow makes you "understand" better. You can't offer any proof of that and it is logically absurd.

11 is the number one unit past ten. There is nothing else needing to be understood about it when learning to count. These are the names of the numbers. The first time you see the name "11" you do not need to also memorize that it is one unit of tens and one unit of ones in order to either count that far or correctly add numbers to 11.
 
AlaskaBushPilot said:
The hoax is that Gates' committee had to find some difference between the present math pedagogy and the as-yet unwritten common core approach.
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You keep saying "as yet unwritten." Again, the standards were finalized by June of 2010. You're now saying the "common core approach" to math was not yet written at that time, but the documents show otherwise.
 
Argumemnon said:
Isn't math all about memorising? "Why does 12 x 4 = 48" can only lead to the answer "because that's the way it is."

'Course, this isn't the same for other subjects, but math is pretty much the king of "you have to know this", outside of languages.
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I don't think it is.

Yes, knowing multiplication tables makes a lot of it easier but you can get around it.

Anecdote alert: I went to a grammar school (i.e. state-run and selective via the 11-plus test), some of my friends were far ahead of me in maths ability - I was in the top stream. For our mock exams after the first term of the lower-sixth (age 17, now called year 12) we had been taught 80% of the 2-year syllabus, so we were given a past paper and given 80% of the time and told to answer 80% of the exam, which, unsurprisingly was then normalised.

One guy in my year got 88% (unnormalised) on that paper - in other words he derived the approach to some of the syllabus that we hadn't yet been taught whilst sitting the mock exam. He certainly wasn't memorizing it.
 
RobRoy said:
This is such a great point. I'm very glad to be reading such reasoned arguments for and again, especially by folk who are on the front lines.
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Lol. These melodramatic teacher-worship lines may make you feel better but we are getting our asses kicked by people who we call third-world.

I see your kid won an award. You must be so proud. We have all kinds of ribbons, medals, and awards at our public school too. Everyone gets a ribbon.

They score approximately 18th percentile on the PISA scale. How is your kid doing on an actual standardized international test?

You just admitted you don't know how your son is doing math. We find that irresponsible. A grown adult who doesn't know how his own child does elementary math.

We have come to understand that the public school parents are the ones who care the least about their kids and that is why you get all this defensiveness and attack on parents who put so much time into it.

You are lazy, and don't care. That is why you don't know. You turned your back on your kids. It isn't good enough to use school as your babysitting service.

You defend common core math without knowing how it works. It is just a defense mechanism. It must be better because I don't want the shame and guilt I deserve for paying no attention to how my kid is educated.

But now the impetus to common core has quit. The requirement for adherence has been removed with the ESSA.

That would leave you defending whatever your state does next for the same reason: you can't be bothered to know, but your self-esteem requires that whatever is happening to your child must be the best.
 
AdamSK said:
You keep saying "as yet unwritten." Again, the standards were finalized by June of 2010. You're now saying the "common core approach" to math was not yet written at that time, but the documents show otherwise.
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lol. All you know is that "something" was written in 2010. Obviously you have never seen it.

Like every other proponent of it. That is why you can't understand. Because you've not seen it.

Tell me I am wrong. :)
 
AlaskaBushPilot said:
11 is the number one unit past ten. There is nothing else needing to be understood about it when learning to count. These are the names of the numbers. The first time you see the name "11" you do not need to also memorize that it is one unit of tens and one unit of ones in order to either count that far or correctly add numbers to 11.
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This part I disagree with. What you seem to be advocating is a name, a label. What we really want to teach is a concept.

Feynman had a great little bit on the difference.

Now, I can't really say what I'm describing should be taught to kids - that's a question for educators. But I certainly see a meaningful difference and prefer the concept-centered approach over the rote.

I assume everyone follows the path I did - at some point, rote no longer works. Maybe it's algebra when the formulas start to stack up. Maybe it's trig, or physics. Somewhere in there memorization needs to have more support - the "why" behind the curtain. You want to be able to derive these things, see what makes them tick.

ETA: Here's a quote from part of the Feynman thing...
“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.”
 
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Argumemnon said:
Yeah but calculators have existed for a long time, so is the problem that math is too hard or that kids nowadays just don't have the patience for it because of their upbringing?
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They do lack patience, but they also lack a sense of when to use which tool. Many in the HS where I work don't have the multiplication table memorized, or have not absorbed such truisms that -1 x 10=-10. So they drag out the calculator early on, and want to turn all fractions and irrational numbers into decimals. Being told "I'm looking for a fraction answer" helps. The kids who went to middle school in Mexico are a little bit ahead.

It's not that the calculator is bad, just that over-reliance on it IMO keeps students from mastering basic "number sense" that would help them across the board.
 
RobRoy said:
He sat back for a moment, thought about it, and provided a wrong answer. I told him to try again, and he said, "Oh, I forgot to add the four back in," then he provided the correct answer. I don't know what "four" he needed, but whatever the process they've taught him, he gets it.
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Making mistakes and comprehending why is powerful. He may have gotten this from Common Core, or he could just be one of those kids with better number sense. He was already thinking about numbers when he undertook subtracting one 4-digit number from another.

Quite a few people avoid thinking about numbers if they can.
 
marplots said:
This part I disagree with. What you seem to be advocating is a name, a label. What we really want to teach is a concept.
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Twaddle. I hear this kind of excuse-making ******** from underperformers. I had over two decades of university teaching and it was pretty clear the kids were picking this crap up from their public school teachers.

Yeah, those Asians, all they can do is memorize. Whereas the American students - boy they learn CONCEPTS. Our bad scores on those tests don't really show how great we are at math!

Of course, our graduate schools, most especially STEM areas are being taken over by foreign students because the Universities are so dumb they think these Asians actually know what they're doing.



I prefer the concept-centered approach over the rote.
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Repeating this twaddle doesn't make it true. It is a false dichotomy in the first place.

You memorize concepts too. Your brain is not prohibited from understanding a concept when it is ALSO capable of remembering 2 + 2 = 4. These are not mutually exclusive. Your position is absurd on the face of it.

Shanghai is finishing YEARS ahead of your local school district in math. They are doing calculus and you are probably doing nothing more than Algebra. They've had trig, analytical geometry, etc.

Here you are pretending these Asians, knowing the concept of the first derivative, principles of finding maxima and minima, physics - that American students know "Concepts" whereas all they are doing is memorizing. When the truth is they've had YEARS more math than their American counterparts.

It's inexcusable. For bad attitude.

That's why they are kicking our ass. We have lazy, excuse-making attitudes. A sense of entitlement. I'll just make up some ******** excuse for why they are doing so much better. That will get me admitted to college ahead of them. That will get me the job ahead of them.

It is bizarre that despite the sunset of common core - over and done with two years after it was finally rolled out in field testing - people are proponents of it still.

It's over. ESSA is one epitaph. The Gates Foundation quitting another. Key states going their own way another. Math scores falling on NAEP exams another.

States who were manipulated into Common Core with Race to the Top money are now left holding the bag. Every state can do exactly what it wants, no funding can be made contingent on a national standard.

So why do it.
 
AlaskaBushPilot said:
States who were manipulated into Common Core with Race to the Top money are now left holding the bag. Every state can do exactly what it wants, no funding can be made contingent on a national standard.

So why do it.
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Common Core? I don't know. But teaching concepts over rote has a real objective: a concept captures more and allows students to generate their own rules.

It's a false sense of accomplishment when we point to the kid who can multiply 6 X 5 and on up to 10 X 10, rapidly and without error if all they are doing is a kind of sing-song mimicry. What happens when 12 X 12 comes up?

* Memory is finite in a way that concepts are not. That's why you do it.
* Rote relies on an appeal to authority, concepts on discovery. That's why you do it.
* We value thinking above answer production. That's why you do it.
* Memorization stresses span and stimulus/response over engagement; concepts push for meta-cognition. That's why you do it.
* Memorization allows students to handle known problems in known contexts. Concepts allows for broader pattern-matching and innovation. That's why you do it.
* Memorization gives you regurgitated talking points. Concepts promotes analysis and depth. That's why you do it.

ETA: We might do better separating the politics from the educational objectives, since they might pull in different directions.
 
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Minoosh said:
Making mistakes and comprehending why is powerful. He may have gotten this from Common Core, or he could just be one of those kids with better number sense.
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He got the wrong answer. So you two just drone on about how wonderful that is.

I'll stick with my kid getting the right answer.

So will the Japanese, the Chinese, Hong Kong, Singapore, all the top academic countries. They're into getting the right answers, which is why they will outscore our little Johnny here by 2 standard deviations on an international math exam.

Your opinion is irrelevant to the education and job market. They want correct answers. Bridges that hold weight, estimates of materials needs working out exactly, etc.
 
T

marplots said:
But teaching concepts over rote has a real objective:.
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You are the worst student in the class, making up stupid sophistry for why you did so badly on the exam.

Everyone else just memorized. You understood the CONCEPTS, with your "F" grade. The fallacy of false dichotomy: The choice between being a whiz at your math tables and "understanding" it. Using that argument shows what little logic skill you have. There is an extremely strong correlation between math competency and drilling. That's why you do it. Repetition becomes instinct in the same way drilling in sports does.

I know that you were a poor student. No good student has your attitude. This really has a lot to do with public school teachers being such poor examples to their students: inculcating laziness and excuse-making.

I don't know how you can do this to those kids. Send them off to the maw of international labor market competition teaching them that incorrect answers is okay, don't worry about drilling your multiplication tables, etc.
 
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Guy who is predicting a Trump landslide makes a big deal out of red states rejecting a politicized program championed by one of the most popular liberals on the planet.

Did you sent this out as a chain email too?
 
Haven't you heard? A students work for C students.

Once we decide that rote memorization and puppetry is the goal, we are still left having to decide what exactly we want them to memorize. Bible verses anyone? Cursive handwriting? State capitals? Impressive poetry they don't understand?

Dance for us little monkeys, dance.
 
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