Posted on 05/15/2015 9:41:09 AM PDT by SoConPubbie
Sample questions guaranteed to make your brain hurt in all the wrong places.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative is widely denounced for imposing confusing, unhelpful experimental teaching methods. Following these methods, some have created problems that lack essential information or make no sense whatsoever.
Some 45 states and the District of Columbia have so far adopted Common Core standards, leaving students all around the United States to puzzle over mysterious logic and language devised in accordance with Common Core’s new methods.
Here are eleven Common Core–compliant problems that have caused parents, students, and even teachers to scratch their heads or respond in outrage:
1. Starting with an easily solvable problem, New York takes the simple “7+7″ and complicates it with something called “number bonds.”
2. Not willing to ruin addition alone, educators take aim at subtraction as well, forcing students to make visual representations of numbers in columns.
3. This third-grade Common Core-compliant question asks students to match the shaded geometrical figures with their corresponding fractions. Problem is the figures aren’t shaded.
4. The first question on this first-grade math test, found by the Washington Post, makes one wonder how coins relate to cups.
5. From the same test, numbers 7 and 8 unnecessarily complicate simple arithmetic with odd, quadrilateral diagrams.
6. This question apparently eschews the use of rulers.
7. This “cheat sheet” provided to parents at an Atlanta elementary school provides definitions for some of Common Core’s Newspeak vocabulary, which throws out stuffily precise language like “add” and “subtract.” Under the obsolete math paradigm, students were bored by “word problems,” but in the new era they are challenged by “math situations.” And where a pre-enlightenment teacher might advise students to “borrow” a number when performing an equation, today’s kids are trained to “take a ten and regroup it as ten ones.”
8. Students now learn to visually show “doubles plus one . . .”
9. Apparently, “1” is a very blue number.
10. Last up: A math problem that isn’t a problem at all. In fact, the answer is stated at the very beginning.
— Alec Torres is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been amended since its initial posting.
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Very enlightening. Now I don’t blame Trayvon for dropping school to become a burglar. Hell, I might have joined him!
Now this is effective criticism. And funny!
Common core is designed to discourage children and produce dumbed down DemocRat voters.
They need to dump this math and get Saxon Math.
I use the methods in the first two examples all the time to do math in my head. So does my Shanghai born and educated ladyfriend. But the other examples are just stoopid!
All of that gave me a headache, no wonder kids are failing in their education today.
The only word I can use to describe this stuff is “asinine”.
7 plus 7 and they have to make it difficult to explain. It’s simple math done in your head and for young kids add them on their fingers
Who comes up with this crap, someone sitting in DC?
King Harold killed how many Normans?
(a) A million
(b)100 from Column "A", and coupla dozen from Column "B."
(c) Killing Normans is Racist
(d)Not enough
(d) All of the above
(e) Some of the above
The question is eurocentric, and microaggressive and an answer should not be required from children of color.
Bump
I saw a first grade math book and couldn’t makes head or tails out of it and I am teaching a 10 year old homeschooler algebra. There was a story in the local paper about common core and an engineer (he designed pipes) who couldn’t make sense of his daughter’s third grad math work.
What people don’t get is that for a very long time people learned math by actually putting forth an effort. In fact, putting forth an effort, one is more likely to retain the material being taught. We are told children get discouraged by hard work and failure, yet they can fail time and time again at some video game without giving up. You learn more from your mistakes than successes. Getting students comfortable with mistakes can be difficult.
One thing I do is to have my student try a problem she has not seen before. At first this seemed like a complete waste; she wouldn’t even come close and simply get frustrated. Now I give her problems that are a step or two ahead of where she is at in algebra and she more often than not figures them out and looks at me like an idiot for giving her such easy work.
It’s like going to the gym; you need to stress that muscle a little, easily at first and then rather hard when you are in shape.
LOL
THIS is why I was a hopeless basket case all through school when it came to Math. The “New Math” which was unleashed on me in 1970 was not too different at all from this crap. They had me so confused by second grade it was years before I caught on.
Someone who has never actually done math. Source: I am an engineer.
There is a reason we had the times tables beaten into our heads in the '60's and before. We needed to memorize that stuff so we could get on with learning real math.
Common core
And here are some of Huckabee's "clear" statements supporting ('came out swinging') Common Core:
Huckabee, however, has a history of supporting Common Core. As late as August of 2014 he called on conservatives to “stop the fight” over Common Core and, instead, consider the positive effects the nationalized standards might have on students in poorly performing schools.
In June of 2013, Sunshine State News reported that Huckabee “came out swinging…in defense of Common Core Standards in education,” and “sent a letter to lawmakers in Oklahoma, urging them to support Common Core.”
“It’s disturbing to me there have been criticisms of these standards directed by other conservatives including the RNC,” Huckabee wrote to the lawmakers. “The truth of the matter is, these criticisms are short-sighted.”
And yet, Huck's spokesperson has the audacity to say this now ....
Now that he’s a candidate for President, there will be countless efforts to try and misrepresent the Governor’s clearly stated and well-documented position against Common Core. This is just simply another one of those election year lies.
Governor Huckabee believes education is a family function, not a federal function – period. Anyone who says otherwise is either misinformed or not telling the truth.
Huckabee is pissing on the GOP base and telling them it's raining. Don't believe him.
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