Posted on 11/13/2013 7:01:38 AM PST by Nachum
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.”
They are looking much deeper into their navels, and/or genitals. That's about all.
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
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.
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.
Let’s turn math into a ‘village!’
>> “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.
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.
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....
Another reason to homeschool.
>> “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.
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.
And they will sign their McDonald’s paychecks how?
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.
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.
That's pretty much the Marxist formula for marriage and sexuality, too. Also a disaster.
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.
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.
When did math become touchy-feely enough to have needed group sessions? Creating maroons one group at a time.
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.
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.