Use George Polya's 1945 Classic "How to Solve It" to Stick Common Core Math back up where the moon don't shine

Armed with George Polya's 1945 classic "How to Solve It--A New Aspect of Mathematical Method", it should be possible to prove that the elite educationists who foisted the nuclear hot-potato of Common Core Math into the laps of the American public did it with full, willful malice, and ram it back up their ying-yang. You know its true, you knew it before the kids were at home all day on Chromebooks and you could hear the teacher, even good ones, insisting that if students had thrown off the Common-Core Math stupidity and solved their problems the straightforward way, they were doing it wrong.

The elites forgot to notice that most kids will not go beyond Algrebra II and Geometry. Only Electricians need to go on to Trig, and they're in chronic short supply. The educationist eggheads, most of whom have never taken higher math, insist on kids going through the agony of the tortuous problem setups you will never see in higher math, but the kids give up and are permanently ruined from taking any more math, a result that is just too similar to the Why Johnny Can't Read result that an on-fire kindergartner going full guns into 1st grade reading comes out a babbling dyslexic--it's deliberate, it's the actual agenda behind the obvious dumbing-down of school.

The eggheads' prextext for Common Core Math is that "you can't learn higher math problem solving by the rote method" that works best for arithmetic through long division. It's a false paradigm. When we went thru lower reaches of higher math, thru College Algebra and Calculus, we never noticed that there was any problem with the rote method, we just used a recipe approach that was an extension of rote arithmetic, using blackboard drills, a higher rote, for untying the knots of algebra like learning to cook with recipes: the first time you make a dish, you have a 50% chance messing up, but the real issue is, what you learned from your mistakes out the gate, the 2nd & 3rd time through a recipe, say, brownies, you learned how to straighten out all the mess and have a pretty good routine by the 4th time.

So in algebra, you learned how to simplify relatively straightfoward, somewhat complex expressions. There could be some bad ones, that you could get help with, you could find the solution in a book and add that to your arsenal of memorized solutions. This is like Polya's dictum that, when you run into a roadblock in a problem, you just find a simpler sub-part of the problem, solve that, and use it to extend up to more and more complete parts of the solution.

The way this differs diametrically from Common Core Math is, it's designed to get you to success. When I was a professional bakery foreman on an extremely complex and touchy piece of machinery, when you would get a bad dough, running was difficult, you had to fight the whole dough from beginning to the bitter end, the solution everyone knew was to shut down the machine, start cleaning up before ringing for the next dough, going through the eurythmy of cleaning up the work area, put you back into the right rhythm, the next dough was better, and you got over the rough patch.

Common Core Math isn't designed to make it better, its secret, evil heart is dedicated to making students fail, it doesn't have a success manual, it doesn't have a universal problem solution key that the teacher can keep locked up in the desk and spring out like Easter candy to help a struggling student. When students go into a permanent failure meltdown, Common Core Math has done its job.

Saxon Math is what we used to home school the kids with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_math

In some reviews, such as ones performed by the prominent nonprofit curriculum rating site EdReports.org[5], Saxon Math is ranked poorly because it is not aligned with the Common Core State Standards Initiative. That initiative, which has been adopted by most U.S. states, is an important factor in determining which curricula are used in public schools in those states. However, Saxon Math continues to be popular among private schools and homeschoolers, many of whom favor its more traditional approach to teaching math.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Saxon_(educator)

Saxon was born in Georgia to parents John Harold and Zollie McArthur Saxon. He graduated from Athens High School in 1941 in Athens, Georgia, and later attended the University of Georgia.[1]

He earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1949 and his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1961. He became an officer in the United States Army Air Forces, commanding a B-17 Flying Fortress in World War II.[2] He later joined United States Air Force, flying 55 missions in a B-26 Invader on Night Intruder missions during the Korean War and reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel.[2] In 1953, he survived a crash when a B-25 Mitchell engine failed on takeoff.[2] That year, he also received a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.[1] Saxon also taught engineering at the United States Air Force Academy[2] for five years.

After his retirement from the Air Force in the 1970,[2] he settled in Norman, Oklahoma. He taught algebra part-time at Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma.[3][4]

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, John Saxon spoke out against mathematics education reform efforts that he believed would lead to a disaster in math and science education. He wrote or co-wrote a series of nine mathematics textbooks for kindergarten through high school which use an incremental teaching method often called "Saxon math". According to Saxon in media interviews in the 1980s and early 1990s and documentation coming with the high-school level textbooks, the inclusion of specialised and/or somewhat uncommon words such as "sciolist" in the story problems is intended as a vocabulary builder in preparation for the verbal section of the SAT and similar tests.[5]

The basic philosophy of his approach was incremental development and continuous review. Incremental development meant that larger concepts were broken down into smaller, more easily understood pieces that were introduced over time; continuous review refers to the practice of concepts in cumulative problem sets once they were introduced. As a student completed a new concept, a brief review of the previous chapters and concepts were also tested.

The last person who understood all of mathematics died 75 years ago. It is a window that was once a stained-glass whole but has now started cracking. Dark masters like Francis Dalton’s rendering of what was once straightforward fact, into the religion of science as omniscience, contributed to the decay. If “science” were in charge of the Gordian Knot of Covid19 controversies, there would be a multi-national insistence on a top, U.N. commission to straighten out the mess, on the basis of rigorous peer reviews, a kind of lethal gymnasium of the mind. Instead, the world of “science” is running around like a roach-infested kitchen when someone has started knocking on the walls. We are entering a new dark ages. It’s up to the regular people living out on the margins to keep together the remnants of what was once a great civilization.

I was one of the lucky math teachers who saw George Polya at the math conference held at Asilomar. (1971)?

He did a problem that emphasized how sometimes looking at a problem in three dimensions simplifies a two dimensional problem so that the solution is obvious.

Loved it.

Agree that common core is a bad way to teach math, as was “the New Math” in its time. However the clear way to teach math well is to have teachers who understand the math they are teaching well. Also they need to be able to understand student questions and be able to “see” where the student has something fundamental that they do not understand.

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