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Common Core or Common failure? Families pull kids out of class
katu.com ^ | 11/13/13 | Dan Cassuto KATU News and KATU.com Staff

Posted on 11/13/2013 7:01:38 AM PST by Nachum

HILLSBORO, Ore. – Nine parents pulled their seventh- and eighth-graders out of math class and started teaching them at home, because they are upset with the new Common Core curriculum that public schools in Oregon are starting this year.

Seventh-grader Amy Craig has always been an "A" student in math until this year. She came home with a "D."

The same thing happened to other students in her school. So their moms got together and decided to teach math themselves – an hour every morning.

Then the kids go off to school for the rest of the day.

This is the first school year when every public school in Oregon is using Common Core teaching standards. Forty-five other states use those, too.

"Our teachers would tell you math is more challenging this year than it was a year ago," said Rian Petrick, principal of Evergreen Middle School in Hillsboro, who is not surprised kids are struggling.

Math hasn't changed, but he said there are now fewer numbers and formulas and many more word problems and real-world examples. It includes more group work. That's tough for some kids.

"Our teachers feel like it's the best thing for kids, making them look much deeper into mathematics than they have in the past," Petrick said.

(Excerpt) Read more at katu.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: arth; common; core; failure; oregon; publicschools
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To: jocon307

A couple of weeks ago there was an article about a Long Island school whose principal said he couldn’t understand why so many students who did so well in math last year are failing it this year under Common Core. He said they would have to go to remedial classes.

I hope the parents’ response to that directive is “Don’t waste my kid’s time on remedial math. He already knows how to do math. Change the curriculum.”


61 posted on 11/13/2013 8:36:04 AM PST by goldi
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To: wintertime
"...it's the best thing for kids, making them look much deeper into mathematics..."
It is very likely that these teacher ( who are making kids "look much deeper" into mathematics) would FAIL the GED math section!

They are looking much deeper into their navels, and/or genitals. That's about all.

62 posted on 11/13/2013 8:38:09 AM PST by Albion Wilde ("Remember... the first revolutionary was Satan."--Russian Orthodox Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov)
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To: The_Reader_David

However did children manage to learn math before the revelations of Common Core?

I would say that the cause of the “slide” we are talking about in education is quite debatable and possible has zero (no pun intended) to do with the lack of Common Core teaching techniques.

By the way, are you familiar with Charlotte Iserbyt?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywd_U1T9Ck0


63 posted on 11/13/2013 8:40:20 AM PST by Nachum (Obamacare: It's. The. Flaw.)
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To: dragonblustar
My child’s school is teaching islam and the teacher recited the shahadah. He said you can say it without really becoming a muslim

Yet if you say the Lord's Prayer or 23rd Psalm in a school, they call out Homeland Security and put the place on lockdown.

64 posted on 11/13/2013 8:40:53 AM PST by Albion Wilde ("Remember... the first revolutionary was Satan."--Russian Orthodox Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov)
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To: Mamzelle
The kid that struggles with algebra will often excel at geometry. Algebra is so much abstraction, an linear thinking. But geometry is shapes, and getting it is more intuitive.

That was certainly my experience. And I only needed sort of basic arithmatical accounting to run my design business. It was a blow to the self-esteem, tho, when the algebra teacher wouldn't help me "because I was a girl." These days, it would be a lawsuit.

65 posted on 11/13/2013 8:48:06 AM PST by Albion Wilde ("Remember... the first revolutionary was Satan."--Russian Orthodox Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov)
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To: Nachum

Let’s turn math into a ‘village!’


66 posted on 11/13/2013 8:48:51 AM PST by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
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To: jpsb

>> “Why anyone would change how math is taught is beyond me.” <<

Are you old enough to remember “SMSG?”

That was when the US began its descent to the bottom.


67 posted on 11/13/2013 8:51:03 AM PST by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
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To: aruanan
An excellent outline of the mid-level education orthodoxy and the emergence of teacher unions, most especially over the past century.

It's an amazing story, how the U.S. ever adopted the centralized, essentially Prussian model of education, outlined well by John Taylor Gatto in "The Underground History of American Education."

Gatto covers some great historic ground, and in an entertaining way, but doesn't delve into Philosophies of Education, an area American Conservatives of the early 21st century would immediately recognize. Few these days seem to realize that no one can receive a teaching license, so to speak, without passing muster with rules put in place by the teaching colleges. A prospective teacher must adopt one, and only one, flavor of one, and only one, Philosophy of Education, i.e., "Experimentalism."

That single flavor of Experimentalism is, of course, John Dewey's Progressive Education.

The heart of a monster ostensibly built to create workers to serve the machines of both government and business in a fascist vision of the future from 100 years ago. That heart is based on an overall philosophy of being that was, and remains, alien to American language and thought, where the individual exists only as "a foci of relationships," with no more identity that that of a wave in an ocean.

Even teachers don't know the requirements which are presented to them in our teaching colleges as simply "education."

It really is monstrous, with a track record and legacy everyone can see, and really can't avoid, that is almost never traced back to its sources. And, yes, it's all of a whole with Progressiveism. Dewey and Woodrow Wilson were thick as fleas.

I appreciated Gatto's citation of test scores before, during and immediately following World War II, the results of precisely the same skill tests given to new recruits of similar age groups entering military service during World War II and just 10 years later going into the Korean conflict.

Something happened on the homefront while most Americans were busy fighting the Axis and then adopting to the world that emerged afterward.

Test scores plummeted, dramatically.

Yes, indeed. The Dumbing Down process is not just a result of lazy, incompetent teachers. It is deliberate.

68 posted on 11/13/2013 8:53:25 AM PST by Prospero (Si Deus trucido mihi, ego etiam fides Deus.)
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To: WalterSkinner
It would be hilarious if it weren't so pathetic to hear administrators explain to Special Education teachers how this is going to work with moderate to severe autistic students--feelings over facts...

They say: You're the special education teacher. You figure it out.

SpEd teachers are no longer allowed to teach. We have to "expose" the students to the curriculum. My suggestion to have them sit on the texts did not go over well....

69 posted on 11/13/2013 8:56:06 AM PST by SCalGal (Friends don't let friends donate to H$U$, A$PCA, or PETA.)
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To: dragonblustar

Another reason to homeschool.


70 posted on 11/13/2013 8:58:30 AM PST by Salvation ("With God all things are possible." Matthew 19:26)
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To: Albion Wilde; Mamzelle

>> “The kid that struggles with algebra will often excel at geometry.” <<

.
The reason for that is the extensive use of ‘jargon’ in Algebra classes. Rather than explaining what was really being done, teachers would use terms like “Transpose” and give a list of Rules of how to transpose, instead of simply stating that it amounted to performing the same operation to both sides of the equation.

My step-daughter got hung up on that crap until I spent a long evening discussing her difficulties, and realized that they had managed to turn simple operations into mystical magic.


71 posted on 11/13/2013 9:00:04 AM PST by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
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To: aruanan
The teachers, though often well-intentioned, are generally from the very bottom of the barrel of college graduates in terms of grades, ability, and proficiency in almost anything (see how education majors compare to engineering majors in the GRE... Look at the absurd product of candidates for ... a masters or doctorate in education. Their theses are rarely more than Mickey Mouse feces).

And yet one of my in-laws, an elementary teacher, was so impressed with her brilliance that she tried to run everything and dictate to everyone in her husband's family -- her parents-in-law, the elder siblings-in-law, aunts-, uncles-, cousins-in-law and their families -- even the caterers of her in-law's 50th wedding anniversary party, causing major strife and estrangement. If your point of view differed from hers in any way, you were not only wrong, you were immoral!

And to think she married someone who was a Republican going into the marriage.

72 posted on 11/13/2013 9:02:29 AM PST by Albion Wilde ("Remember... the first revolutionary was Satan."--Russian Orthodox Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov)
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To: Captain7seas

And they will sign their McDonald’s paychecks how?


73 posted on 11/13/2013 9:02:45 AM PST by NTHockey (Rules of engagement #1: Take no prisoners. And to the NSA trolls, FU)
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To: Captain7seas

Why not? They are dooming them to being permanently handicapped. Cursive writing is faster than printing something, if you have to jot it down. What, do they think everyone has a keyboard of some sort handy all the time? How completely asinine.


74 posted on 11/13/2013 9:03:44 AM PST by EinNYC
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To: afraidfortherepublic

Regarding handwriting, have you suffered from seasonal allergies or food allergies? It can make a child’s handwriting go haywire in spring and fall, just when they are judged the most strictly in school. Many kids suffer from the combination of milk and peanut allergies — just the thing many of us ate in school lunchboxes. My kid went wild with hyperactivity, red nose and cheeks and frequent sinus infections until we got his diet adjusted. Two other of my boy relatives had all that and bedwetting, too.


75 posted on 11/13/2013 9:06:16 AM PST by Albion Wilde ("Remember... the first revolutionary was Satan."--Russian Orthodox Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov)
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To: Jack of all Trades
The recipe for Common Core math: throw process and rigor out the window, center the curriculum around multiculturalism and inclusivity, foster an environment of unfocused discovery where each child invents mathematics from the ground up. Disaster.

That's pretty much the Marxist formula for marriage and sexuality, too. Also a disaster.

76 posted on 11/13/2013 9:07:54 AM PST by Albion Wilde ("Remember... the first revolutionary was Satan."--Russian Orthodox Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov)
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To: Nachum

I have always suspected that a prime goal of Common Core is to separate the elite from everyone else, to hinder kids who can do rote work very well but may not be able to re-invent math in their seventh-grade minds.


77 posted on 11/13/2013 9:08:53 AM PST by Steve_Seattle
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To: afraidfortherepublic

Sad Catholic schools used to be very good schools, back in the day then Nuns and Brothers did the teaching. I never went to one, but I was impressed with friends that did. They were very well educated.


78 posted on 11/13/2013 9:17:47 AM PST by jpsb (Believe nothing until it has been officially denied)
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To: Nachum

When did math become touchy-feely enough to have needed group sessions? Creating maroons one group at a time.


79 posted on 11/13/2013 9:24:36 AM PST by MaxMax (Pay Attention and you'll be pissed off too! FIRE BOEHNER, NOW!)
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To: Paladin2

I am trying to figure out how a “group” can do math, which involves operation within an individual’s brain.

A team can only move as fast as the weakest horse. Maybe the groups should read Animal Farm together so everyone can learn about Hope and Change.


80 posted on 11/13/2013 9:40:20 AM PST by Chewbarkah
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