[BikerJoe]

Estimation has its places, but it seems to be given way too much emphasis.

I'm actually glad to see them trying to get kids thinking about whether they did it correctly. LONG before Common Core, I'd sit in reviews where engineers had stuff going faster than light or something, and I was able to see the problem just because the order of magnitude was wrong, but for some reason, they'd never see it.

There are lots of reasons to hate Common Core, but I'm not sure this is one of them.

[KarlInOhio]

I'd sit in reviews where engineers had stuff going faster than light or something,

I just got a twinge from a semiconductor physics class where the professor gave us a "simple" problem (only about five pages of calculations) which resulted in an electron going twice the speed of light. Each of the students independently was asking the professor bizarre questions about how relativity works in a semiconductor lattice or what effects the increase in mass of an electron because of its speed would have without ever admitting the problem - the professor broke the primary law of the universe. The next class the professor said "I don't know why you thought this problem was hard," cranked out two blackboards of math and came up with twice the speed of light. Oops. He admitted to just changing a couple of input numbers from the problem he gave the class a couple of years before without solving it himself.