Posted on 08/18/2013 9:28:41 AM PDT by grundle
Quick: what’s 3 x 4?
If you said 11 — or, hell, if you said 7, pi, or infinity squared — that’s just fine under the Common Core, the new national curriculum that the Obama administration will impose on American public school students this fall.
In a pretty amazing YouTube video, Amanda August, a curriculum coordinator in a suburb of Chicago called Grayslake, explains that getting the right answer in math just doesn’t matter as long as kids can explain the necessarily faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong answer.
“Even if they said, ’3 x 4 was 11,’ if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really in, umm, words and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focused on the how,” August says in the video.
When someone in the audience (presumably a parent, but it’s not certain) asks if teachers will be, you know, correcting students who don’t know rudimentary arithmetic instantly, August makes another meandering, longwinded statement.
“We want our students to compute correctly but the emphasis is really moving more towards the explanation, and the how, and the why, and ‘can I really talk through the procedures that I went through to get this answer,’” August details. “And not just knowing that it’s 12, but why is it 12? How do I know that?”
Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW0VxxoCrNo
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Yep, I just got a good lesson in doing just that....not assuming.
I guess I'm/we're stuck in a world where common sense is no longer common....I gots to git in the groove man! lol!
Yep, I just got a good lesson in doing just that....not assuming.
I guess I'm/we're stuck in a world where common sense is no longer common....I gots to git in the groove man! lol!
As a 50+ "non-traditional" student (returned to finish that dang degree) I can tell you point blank this "partial" credit BS happens with too much frequency.
Most of the time it occurs during the review after the exams have been graded, the brats who are forever playing on their I-phones during lectures start their whining "I should get credit because ..." rarely is it for a legitimate oversight on the professors part.
BTW at every opportunity I challenge the liberal viewpoint being spoon-fed to these kids (or shoved down their throats, your choice). I point out the fallacy that is inherent with their position(s), usually in a subtle fashion. Most of the time I think the professors enjoy someone actually engaged in the learning process, and more often than not the topic soon changes because they know I can easily demonstrate the error in their logic.
Sometimes, one or two of the kiddies will comment that they enjoy what I have to say. Hopefully they will continue to question more of the subjective aspects of their education.
Do you really think teachers will be allowed to correct the kids who get the wrong answer? What about their self-esteem? You wouldn’t want the kids to feel badly about themselves do you? The thought police would have you punished for such thinking.
Do you really think teachers will be allowed to correct the kids who get the wrong answer? What about their self-esteem? You wouldn’t want the kids to feel badly about themselves do you? The thought police would have you punished for such thinking.
I know, I already got my spanking....keep reading.
Everyone, do your homework on Common Core. (For example, see http://www.moagainstcommoncore.com/apps/links/.) It is insidious and evil!
Everyone, do your homework on Common Core. (For example, see http://www.moagainstcommoncore.com/apps/links/.) It is insidious and evil!
The answer? Or the habituation of seeking justification for the wrong answer? If the *answer* is corrected but the habit and practice of justifying an errant thought process that leads to said wrong answer is left as an "island" of blather, then, I posit, an association is built up between the no-fault procurement of the correct answer (by the efforts of others) and the resulting feel-good. But the implication is that the seeking of the right answer, independently, is equivocal. It matters little whether the obtained answer is right or wrong. You get the pat on the head either way. The implication is that there will always be someone (the state?) there to correct your wrong answers and you don't have to worry about getting wrong answers. Now we have a generation of kids brought up on this feel good crap and they cannot spell. They cannot write a business letter. They cannot focus their attention on anything except vid games without drugs.
Now, who knows whether the goofball explanation is just left there as something that "almost worked" so it should be tried again....or was a "good try"? (meaning, encouraged) You think that every wrong math question will spawn an encounter session where the student struggling with math gets to expose their feelings? What kind & quality of teacher will be required to achieve that goal? (My answer: Impossibly infinite in terms of skill)
My point is, there is never a state of being flat out, black and white dead nuts wrong in this picture. That is a valid and undeniably extant state. In fact, there are a bazillion wrong answers to a simple math problem and ONLY ONE right one. But as part of this (my terminology) overall effort at indoctrination in favor of conformity and against individuality, whatever is individual is to be destroyed. THAT is my thematic objection to this. Now you may say "BS, this approach recognizes the individual and his/her shortcomings and encourages...whatever". I just don't think so, even though I could not prove it you. The destruction of right allows a lot of room for wrong. And you may think I am being reactionary, but I see this everywhere; from 0bama ignoring the Constitution (or even black letter as-written law) to plenty of other things going on that many would view as a general, non-specific societal breakdown.
Believe me, I am no prude. But we gotta do something about kids not knowing their damned times tables and how to spell words and how to think. I'm not an educator so maybe I am unqualified to opine.
Yikes FRiend, you're making a mountain out of a molehill.
Believe me, I am no prude. But we gotta do something about kids not knowing their damned times tables and how to spell words and how to think. I'm not an educator so maybe I am unqualified to opine.
I agree with your sentiment, but sheesh, why all the lengthy analysis over a very simple common sense approach?
Math is an exact, provable subject. I simply wrote that a pupil upon reaching the wrong answer should be questioned as to how he or she reached it, then shown the correct path to reaching the right conclusion. It is logic, no? Isn't that what we want to teach our kids so they can apply it to other facets in life, i.e. critical thinking?
Exactly. So why do we need a national rollout of this new "something" that is, judging by the nature of virtually everything in our society; a scam. A lobbied-for grand national textbook revision at massive expense, designed to enrich textbook publishers and enforcing the idea that the centralized government should set standards and hopefully, develop giant bureaucracies and sub-bureaucracies to illuminate them, discuss them, travel (at taxpayer expense) to hold (at taxpayer expense) conferences about them, give awards to the sparkplugs who champion them...and on and on.
Kinda like....0bamacare.
Kinda like Cash for Clunkers
Kinda like cap 'n trade.
It is collectivism at its finest: an effort to centralize the propagandization of children. Very foundational to Marxism. In current context, I find it pretty alarming. And I don't have kids.
See, you also have to consider: 1: Who and what type of folks are in charge of the Dep't of Education (Arne Duncan, nuff said) and 2: what, then, shall be the next milestone along this line where the Feds can now dictate local educational curriculum ...maybe...the school (district) doesn't get funding unless it adheres to CC curriculum? Maybe...homeschooling is de facto eliminated as an option because college entrance tests will be administered to these standards...? Perhaps property taxes should be remitted, to the extent they allegedly pay for schools, to DC?
We are dealing with a Chicago mob mentality in DC. There is nothing they do not want to to control, to rake money off, and there's just about nothing I trust them with.
After seeing that, I might as well start learning Mandarin.
The problem with shifting from an emphasis on merely getting the correct answer to and emphasis on being able to reason and explain how to get the answer is that we don’t have professional mathematicians teaching grade school, junior high or (except in very top private schools) high school: we have old ed majors who won’t in general be able to tell whether mathematical reasoning is sound or an explanation of a mathematical procedure is coherent, nor be able to pick out a subtle error in reasoning to correct it.
In fact, were we putting sufficient resources into mathematics education at the K-12 level, such a shift would be desirable: we really do need folks who understand mathematical reasoning much more than we need folks who can do rote calculations, since most rote calculations are now done by machines, but still need to be interpretted and checked for soundness (remember in GIGO the garbage input can be in either the data or the code). Of course, the route to having such folks includes some rote calculation, since it builds intuition needed for sound reasoning, something educrats generally fail to understand.
Optimal mathematics education would involve first letting students explore each new concept under the tutelage of someone who can recognize when they’re getting things right in a non-standard way, followed by an explanation of why the standard methods (the ones we learned by rote back in the day) are optimal, followed by teaching those methods, including drill so they become routine, followed by application to something interesting. It would take two to three times the amount of time American schools are willing to devote to mathematics instruction. Every “reform” of American mathematics education seems to involve the raising of one or another of the piece I just laid out to become the be-all-and-end-all of math teaching to the exclusion of the others.
When I was teaching in Turkey, one day I was talking with the daughter of the Dean of Engineering, who was then in high school. She was complaining about the English books she had to read, like "Catcher in the Rye." She thought they were so depressing. Frankly, they are depressing. So I went to a bookstore, found some English books that I thought she might find more uplifting, and bought them for her. One I bought her was "The Red Badge of Courage." I can't now remember the others, but that one I recalled as an inspiring book.
Reminds my the people in my college that said..
You have your truth and I have mine.. and somebody else theirs..
Which after considering this riddle means Truth is an opinion..
WHich screams they did not know what truth meant..
That made me wonder, what else did they NoT KNOW?..
or the idiot(s) that taught them that..
Karl MArx was a moron that talked a morons language..
To wit; It is good to identify morons.. not all are ugly.. with beards..
By the time I replied, someone had beat me to it.
I didn’t mean to pile on. That’s a personal foul.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.