Posted on 03/23/2010 10:16:52 AM PDT by reaganaut1
On March 10, 2010 the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Achieve, and other organizations issued draft Common Core Standards (CCS) for K-12 mathematics and reading. We at CEMSE have examined the mathematics standards for Grades K-6 and have found them to be seriously flawed.
If we are to have national standards, then those standards should be designed to prepare students for life in the 21st century. We believe that the proposed CCS standards for mathematics in Grades K-6 would promote a back-to-basics curriculum that ignores the profound changes that have taken place in the last 50 years. CCS’s largely paper-and-pencil approach to mathematics in K-6 is obsolete.
We believe CCS’s K-6 mathematics standards have seven serious shortcomings:
1.An overemphasis on paper-and-pencil arithmetic.
2.Inadequate exposure to concepts of data and probability.
3.A disregard of existing and emerging technology.
4.An outmoded approach to geometry.
5.A neglect of applications of mathematics.
6.An interpretation of “focus” that ignores how people learn.
7.An overemphasis on teaching by telling.
We urge the CCS Initiative to revise its 3/10/10 draft standards to address arithmetic, data, probability, technology, geometry, applications, and pedagogy in more forward-looking and research-grounded ways. Elementary school children need a broader approach to arithmetic, a useful grounding in basic data and probability, realistic and interesting applications, access to technology, a geometry curriculum based on research and enabled by technology, and a pedagogy that fits how they actually learn.
We have written a long response and a summary response to these proposed standards. Others, such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and the Alliance for Childhood, have also raised concerns about CCS.
We urge you to read the standards and the critiques and then to make your opinion known. The period for public comment is quite short – only until Friday, April 2 – so you’ll need to act quickly. You may feel free to borrow from what we have written if that helps.
You can comment on the proposed standards by following the feedback links on the CCS Initiative web site. Please also send a copy of your comments to us at ResponseToCCS@cemseprojects.org and to NCTM at commoncore@nctm.org.
From a quick scan, I would say their 7 Faults are of a liberal bent. Paper and pencil is how you do math, for a start. And no elementary school kid needs to know probability. The dumbed-down elementary version is NOT probability, and a conceptual understanding can come much later.
1.An overemphasis on paper-and-pencil arithmetic.
Are they saying that kids should know how to to arithmetic by memory and doing mental math? If so, then that’s a good thing. I have found that a lot of the curriculums do not teach this.
2.Inadequate exposure to concepts of data and probability.
At what age? Early math it doesn’t matter, but probably does matter in higher math classes.
3.A disregard of existing and emerging technology.
I don’t think this matters in early math classes, but the closer you get to calculus the more this matters.
4.An outmoded approach to geometry.
?? Don’t know about this. I think geometry is geometry.
5.A neglect of applications of mathematics.
I do think this is important. Some kids tune out to math because they think it’s not relevant. They need to see how math is used in things like cooking to baseball stats.
6.An interpretation of “focus” that ignores how people learn.
Learning styles is important. My daughter had a hard time with Saxon math because she has speech and language problems. Saxon math is very wordy. My daughter switched curriculums and is doing very well. Not all kids learn the same way.
7.An overemphasis on teaching by telling.
I like the use of manipulatives for some kids. However, my kids didn’t need to use manipulatives because they were good at math. I like the use of different curriculums for different kids.
I forgot to add that the standards should be the same. How kids achieve those standards can be changed.
For example, some kids need to use manipulatives when learning about multiplication and some kids do not. As long as they both learn to multiply, it doesn’t matter how they learned it.
The old addage of "practice makes perfect" doesn't exist in EM. Instead of learning the basics, they find ways to eventually find the answer with guesses and longer problems. And because of the very unusual methods to get an answer, that are so far from how most of us were taught, it is almost impossible for a parent to figure it out at home without details from the teacher. I always felt like that was done purposely - it made home help impossible so the entire teaching situation was between the child and the teacher.
Heaven forfend that children learn how to do ‘pencil and paper’ math ( AKA arithmetic). These fools don’t seem to realize that the 21st century was designed and come into existence through the work of people using slide rules and log tables. What a joke.
I fought these idiots for YEARS. These are the same folks who devised ‘the new math’ that nearly made a generation math illiterate.
ARRRRRRGGGGGG
If it hadn’t been for Everyday Math, my husband would not have let me homeschool our kids.
I was already teaching them to read, and when I had to add a math class to our after-school day, it was too much for him to take. He said, “Why send them to school if they are just going to have to come home and have school all over again?”
Pseudo-vanity reply: What I found interesting about Everyday Math is I (personally) always did math in my head differently than what I was taught in school back in the last century. When I first saw the EM curriculum I scheduled some time with the teacher to review some of the basic concepts (addition, subtraction, division) and it was like what I had been doing in my head was validated.
“If it hadn’t been for Everyday Math, my husband would not have let me homeschool our kids.”
LOL. I don’t think that was what Everyday Math intended.
You make a good point in your post. Most parents are already homeschooling their children. Two hours of homework every night in addition to school. The teachers send all the tear-inducing work home for the parents to hassle as homework and keep the fun stuff for themselves. Then they blame the parents for not doing all the hard teaching.
We homeschool and it rarely takes us more than three hours a day to finish the curriculum.
If you've ever seen a 5th grader counting on her fingers adding or multiplying to complete the first step of a multistep problem (which ends up taking forever), you'd know what I'm talking about.
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