Just say no to Commie Core.
8th grade students in 1914 were far more knowledgeable than are high school graduates in 2014. Marxist contamination of the schools is to blame, by design. Google Yuri Besmenov to see how the USSR planned this invasion for decades, and won.
Pure Orwellian doublespeak. Critical thinking eliminates things like the idiot logic used in Common Core.
This is just another way to eliminate the meaning of the words.
How does one look at a math problem from "both sides"?
How does one look at correct English grammar from "both sides"?
How does one look at the ability to read from "both sides"?
How does one look at a FACT from "both sides"?
THESE are the things our schools are supposed to be teaching. Issues that have a "both sides" to them are for more advanced classes, which should only be taught once students have thoroughly learned "reading, writing and arithmetic".
Simple solution, just OUTLAW ALL PRIVATE SCHOOLS, watch them abolish this overnight.
Thank God Shakespeare was better educated than students today.
Critical thinking skills cannot be built on a sand foundation where successful approximation at correct spelling is a satisfactory result and math problems become an exercise in breaking down the formula so it can be solved on the fingers rather than knowing math FACTS while applying the correct order of operations. Critical thinking allows you to use established facts to make sense of the world around you, not to create some alternate universe of unicorns pooping rainbow skittles across the sky.
If it were only for information, no one would need public schools (I’d argue that we don’t). Schools are to house kids so both parents can work, and schools are for social sheepherding, and schools are for carrot and stick making kids do their learning.
Common core is forcing kids everywhere to get the exact same education. That is dead wrong when now you can get nearly for free info from all sides about any subject. Common core wants all Americans to have the same exact facts in their heads. It’s more of a box of facts than we need with the explosion of variety of facts available to us.
Also, it’s politically correct. Thus not allowing for other opinions. It’s important for kids to learn from true real documents and books of the times they study, not everything washed through a filter of liberal education experts.
From what I can discern, Common Core attempts to teach expert thinking without teaching the long path needed to get a young mind to that point. Yes, some of those crazy CC math examples ARE representative of how mathematicians actually think about math, but they think that way not because they were taught some convoluted technique in the beginning, but because they started with simple processes and elaborated on them until the concepts were internalized to a point where complex sequences _are_ perceived as simple. The educators implementing these CC approaches don’t actually understand the mental model themselves, so they’re teaching by testing precise “show your work” in complicated sequences rather than evaluating for actual comprehension.
I remember being taught “estimation” in 3rd grade. It was similarly insane, trying to get kids to act on a sense of numbers which they did not have. After you’ve done arithmetic for years (decades?) you may reach a point where you can juggle numbers like juggling recipe ingredients, but you can’t get to that point without lots of precise measuring and faltering attempts in the process of developing that sense.
CC is like trying to teach gourmet cooking without any measuring devices (cups, scales, rulers) and using recipes which include complex sub-recipes that create extra material (”...use a little of the resulting sauce, and refrigerate the rest for later use”) - and grading it with Hell’s Kitchen like brutality over any deviation from the intended result and method for achieving it.