Im curious what everyone thinks of common core math?  
Reason asking is because I keep seeing people up in arms throwing fits over it.  I was never taught common core math, I was taught the old way of just repeatedly doing minute long tests beating the math into your brain.  That never helped me.  Around middle school everything in math just clicked and  I have always been pretty decent at it.  (excluding Calculus... that stuff is black magic).  
A few years ago I went to a little seminar about common core math and what I discovered is the thing that clicked in my head is the same principals that it teaches.  Even to this day, 4 th year studying mechanical engineering i follow those core principals.  While I do not do it exactly the same way, and I can not do it the "proper" way, the way I go about my math is exactly the way you are taught to think about it in common core.

My brother is another example.  He was taught CCM.  He has recently moved to a school that does not teach it.  He is hands down the fastest math student there.  The teachers thought he was cheating, he was always first done on his minute tests, he showed no work, and if he did the work he needed to show was very minimal.  He had to go do his math in the principals office.  Maybe he is just intelligent, but even he said it was just faster and easier for him to do common core.

Why is there such an uproar?  Why are people so against it?  Is there something about the way it is taught that I havent seen?

It rewards   feelings   and not the right answer ....   If NASA had used common  core  .. we would of never landed on the moon ,,,

It does work   if you want to look at a pallet of cans    and make a fast guess.......   but   want the right count     then  it's  not so good

Nevermind

How so?
I guess the way I understood the teaching style is it taught you to break things up into smaller pieces so it was easier to handle.  Quick example 12*8.  Instead of going head long into that, common core teaches you to look at it as (10*8)+(2*8).  Or it would teach you to do round to 10*10 then subtract 4 because you rounded each by 2.  

Maybe though that was just my brain taking what they were saying and making it work for its old style of learning?

That's just normal long multiplication, side note every American should have their multiples of 12 down pretty well because of feet-to-inches.



 

I think that's disingenuous, as math doesn't involve feelings.  Now, my experience with common core math is just the "outrageous" math problems that get posted in GD, but the methods behind it make sense to me.  People are up in arms about it (imo) because it's different than what they were taught, and that's tough for them to grasp.  Instead, each of the problems I've seen is organized to strengthen concepts that are used at higher levels of math. Like the OP, I struggled with some of the rote memorization of some of the math concepts that were taught to me in school, until one day it clicked.  It happens that some of the concepts that clicked, now appear to be taught in this manner.

Now, I think it should be up to each state to set its curriculum and how things are taught in their own schools, but I haven't seen anything that indicates it's a "wrong" way to learn.

Most of the students are unlikely to take anything more than a low level algebra course in college.

They need to now the 'mechanics' of arithmetic and not the theory.

The mechanics are still there, while providing a solid foundation for those going further, again from my VERY limited experience with the curriculum. I suppose I'll see it more first hand in a few years once my son is in school, and I reserve the right to complain at that time.

I was doing this in my head when I was a kid without anyone teaching it to me. The examples I have seen are where kids are having 5 x 3 =15 marked wrong because they explained it as 5 + 5 + 5 = 15 instead of explaining it as 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 +3 = 15.

I've also seen examples where kids get 2 x 5 = 11 and get it correct because they explained how they got their answer to the teachers satisfaction.

I have no problem pointing out to kids that 23 x 9 is the same as (23 x 10) - (23 x 1) = 207. I do have a problem with the feel good it's okay the answer is wrong but you get it right for trying BS.

Oh you would be amazed at the people that walk through the door for a job that can't even add and subtract but yet still managed to get an associates degree for "Industrial Systems Technology".

Was trying to help one guy subtract 46 - 11 in his head and he couldn't do it.

"Come on man, what's 46 -10?"

"30!"

No idea what was wrong with that guy. Interviewd okay but when it came to figuring things out….flop!

I had a linear algebra professor in college who couldn't use actual numbers in problems because he said he didn't know his multiplication tables.  Maybe he needed common core math?

I don't know a lot about CC, but examples like a kid getting an answer wrong because they worked it out instead of saying some number is close enough is ridiculous.  Maybe this is why I can't find anyone young in my field that understands significant digits.

Poorly organized and not vetted. The implementation was rushed as a result of money.

Totally unfair to Special Ed kids. It is obvious that as decisions were being made there was zero quality input from Special Education.

Developmentally inappropriate, in terms of the expectations of students and the method in which certain concepts are instructed.

Over-testing and reliance on "data" has taken focus away from the kids and on to bull shit.

CC and the shit that Pearson is selling are about money.

my thought is it's bullshit

He was a liberal.

Common Core is a scam derived from textbook manufacturers.

New math

Everything that uses math beyond a personal checking account level requires intuition that the classical way of teaching math does not prepare you for. I struggled with math until high school, when it all fell together for me. When I was reading some of the complaints about Common Core, I looked over the teaching styles. Lo and behold, what they teach is exactly the same thing that I had to teach myself in school. Now I am a mechanical engineering major, doing well, using the style of math that CC emphasizes. The old style emphasizes algorithms, which are great for getting the correct answer to a question you have seen before. But when you come across something new, you are nearly helpless until someone shows you how to do it.

The process really is more important than the right answer.

Background: my wife is an elementary teacher and had to teach common core for a bit. I'm an engineer; have almost 10 years working in the field, got a 6 (highest possible) on the AP Calc exam. Not a math wizard by any means, but very quick with addition, multiplication etc. Like you, I had no idea what this common core crap was, so I looked it up. Just like you, I had an epiphany; this is EXACTLY how I've been doing math in my head since elementary school.

All that being said, I don't believe there is anything wrong with the principles of common core. I believe the main issues were (Indiana did away with it) or are the fact that the implementation, curriculum, etc are all wrong for proper learning of the principles. The largest issue is that it's not the way parents learned to do math, so when they help little Johnny, they are lost, he gets it wrong, everybody gets frustrated, emotions run high, and they pitch a fit. A proper implementation would have been to send home a small packet for the parents, "This is how we are teaching math, it's most likely different from the way you learned, here is how you can help little Johnny. If you need additional help understanding the topics, visit this website where you can find instructional videos that can help you help Johnny." The 2nd issue is that in many cases more emphasis is being placed on how you arrived at the answer than the answer itself so you get examples like above where a person with the right answer got it wrong and a person with the wrong answer got it right. You want an angry parents, tell them that the correct answer is wrong; there is nothing that will put distance between a teacher and parent like telling them their child is wrong even though they had the correct answer and arrived at it by a societally acceptable method.

I am a physics teacher and have a major in math and physics. CC in and of itself is not bad. It pushes thinking skills and problem solving. The horror stories you read about are untrained teachers who have no clue what they are doing. The verdict is still up in the air with me.

Common Core is Not Allowed in Texas

We homeschooled, partly due to the math.  One kiddo now has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering.



I think the answer may be hinted at in how U.S student performance in math and science has been steadily declining compared to other industrialized countries.  That's real information, rather than SAT scores continually "recentered" (dumbed down) to obscure that decline.

Education majors keep wanting to try and define WHAT should be taught instead of HOW it should be taught.

They often did very poorly in math and science.

As a Bachelor  of Science  engineer I was required to take more humanities courses than Bachelor of Arts majors had to take science or engineering courses.

The Math Department had 'College Algebra' for them to take a math course if they dared.
I watched some in my dorm not be able to get past that.

Since it was not a 'required' course for their degree they did not have to pass.
Engineers HAD to pass 5 hour calculus or change majors.

Engineering started off with 5-hour calculus for your whole freshman year.

My degree is in math and I learned arithmetic the old fashioned way because I got caught in the wave of "new math" and I didn't get it so my mother taught me the "old ways" and she got some heat for that.  

I'm the father of two, I was a Boy Scout leader for over a decade, and I work in retail with quite a few young people.  It is disheartening to watch young people (30ish and younger) struggle with simple arithmetic.  At work, I see young folks needing their phones to figure out how many fives they'll get when they take two $20s to the office for change.  (it's eight).

Once on a Scout outing we were working on "measurements without measuring tools."  One of the exercises was for the scouts to pace off a known distance counting their paces.  Then they would pace off an unknown distance and using a bit of mental arithmetic, figure out what the unknown distance is.  Pretty simple?  Not for this bunch of 8th graders.  First off, they whined that they needed calculators.  "Not so," I said, "Let's work through this."  I don't remember the details of the conversation but early on I posed the question, "How many times does three go into twenty?"  No one knew.  Later I asked, "What is 10% of 100?"  Again, no one knew so I wound up explaining percentages.  A few minutes later, I asked "What is 12% of 100"  A hand shot up and the Scout said, proudly, "82!"  Another leader who was nearby watching started laughing so hard that he fell over.  I was later told by one of the mothers, "These boys are in honors math, they don't need to know percents anymore."  WTF?  Before you ask, this wasn't some podunk school in East Bumfuck, Arkansas, these were all students in one of the top school districts in the country, headed for the top high school in the state of Maryland.  

***** to finish my story

Not long ago, at work, I was trying to explain the "common core approach" to some coworkers.  I used the example of 27 x 3.  I said, "We know that it's going to be close to 30 x 3, which we know is 90.  So we view this as (30-3) x 3 which gives us (30 x 3) - (3 x 3) giving 90 - 9 for a result of 81.   I lost people at (30 -3).

We've all experienced the confusion that ensues when a cashier inputs $50 instead of $5 for the amount tendered and the machine is telling him that he needs to give you $48 in change instead of $3.

Also not long ago, I heard a mother telling her teenaged daughter that this week's 20% off sale wasn't as good as last week's 10% off sale because 20% is half of 10%.  

A big part of Common Core is memorization of the multiplication and addition tables.  Things that I had to do when I was a kid.  The other part is breaking problems down.  

I don't expect everyone to be a wizard with math.  Third order partial differential equations are not needed by most people.  However, we need to understand basic arithmetic in this country.

I don't know much about common core for English but I hope that it includes spelling.

Similar to Vedic Math. Western nations use a very long drawn out process to get answers. Approximately 1/2 the world using Vedic Assana method. They can out perform western students when manipulation  of numbers involves doing calculations in your head

I'll have to look into this Vedic system.  

My kids are 25 and 23, when my elder child was in the third grade they started using calculators.  I expressed my feelings about that and was given a wibbly-wobbly answer or answers
> They want the children to learn to use a calculator at an early age so they aren't intimidated by them.  I learned at 17 with no problems, my father figured it out at 45.  
> Once they understand the process, the calculator is just a tool.  True but more applicable to third order PDEs than basic ciphering.  
> They can't stop the kids from using calculators at home so we just throw in the towel.  

Now the whole math world is going to hell in a handbasket with graphing calculators.  When I took analytic geometry, we had types of graphs and the functions that generated them hammered into our heads.   That doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Not too far back a friend decided that he wanted to become a teacher, a math teacher, and went back to school.  I'd often wind up helping him with his homework, apparently even after thirty years some things aren't forgotten.   The sad thing was that this guy was so insanely dependent on his graphing calculator that it wasn't funny.   One problem sticks in my head (most of the problem anyway).  It was something like y = x sin x with the question being "How many times does it cross the x axis between 0 and 2 pi."  He started punching away at his calculator and I put my hand over it and said, "Look at it!"  He could not figure it out without his calculator and couldn't understand how I could see it in my head.  Straight A student in his graduate education classes and his math core classes.  

Over dependence on technology.  

The initial idea behind common core made sense.  The original idea was to set a timeline of metrics that all student would be expected to have learned at various points in their education.  That made sense.  Some of the teaching curriculum that have spun out of that initial idea and the meddling of government bureaucracy and publisher greed have become what everyone means when they say common core and are often crap.

That said I have also seem some pretty unique and effective teaching methods that I wish I would have been taught with when I was in school.  I often see criticism of good teaching technique simply because they where not the techniques the critic was taught with.  People also forget that some teaching techniques for young student are only used for a short time to teach new concepts to students and are later abandon for more effective techniques.  Subtraction through addition is a good example here.  Having a young daughter just finishing second grade and helping her with math has been fun.  Some of the ways she get to the correct answer are completely different to the way my brain has been trained (I have taken math through Dif-Eq) but she gets the right answers and can show me how she got it.

When we homeschooled, I already had this attitude about people just punching shit into calculators and computers and blindly accepting what came back.  That approach was at sharp odds with my own experience having learned a slide rule and having to keep track of magnitudes and such.  I had an intuitive sense of whether an answer was in the ballpark, when I would use a calculator, and entry errors were picked up.  I wanted my kids to have that intuitive sense in their own heads and not be reliant on a calculator to TELL them the answer.



We mainstreamed them for calculus, science, and foreign languages, and when they jumped into calculus they had to learn how to use a calculator, a graphing calculator at that.  Teachers were surprised -- we were surprised that such a thing was required --  but it was a trivial learning curve on something mechanical, while the important stuff was already packed into their heads.



tl;dr:  calculators are used as a crutch, and ultimately cripple ability to independently verify results.  Accept authority or think, pick one.





 

Calculators are only a crutch if you let them be.  I did stuff with my calculator back in college that you could never easily do on paper that helped me learn.  When learning Fourier series I remember struggling to understand how the calculated series would result in a square wave, saw tooth, etc from a bunch of sine waves added together.  I wrote a program on my calculator that showed each element of the series and its effect as it was added to the sum of the series.  You watched the square wave form.  It helped the concept make sense to me.

 


Technology is almost always a two edge sword.  You can certainly become dependent on it but you can usually do a lot more a lot quicker with the tech.


 

Yep.  Calculators being used in engineering classes is very different from using a calculator in calculus.

99% of the people bitching about common core have no idea what common core is.  Their total knowledge of the subject comes from a few memes that circulate GD and facebook.

Bring back slide rules!  I did all my second semester physics homework with my dad's slide rule just for shits and giggles.  I still used my HP48SX (RPN Rules!) for tests but using a slide rule really improved my mental math as you still have to keep track of where that decimal belongs.

IMO, the problem isn't necessarily the math itself at all.  To me, arguing about the math is pretty much a red herring.

My issue with CC is the way it shifted control of curriculum away from local or even state control.  Why can't states or local districts choose to use the materials without having to sign up for federal micromanagement along with it?

Edit: Ah can't find out how to delete a post on here.

As with anything, it's about how the teacher approaches it.

My wife teaches 3rd grade GT. She is not so opposed as many think teachers are. She says some kids understand it better. With that being said, she teaches solutions multiple ways, sometimes outside of what CC says.

Again, it's all about the teacher.

Funny but every site wants you to pay to see anything.


A common sign of Bovine Scatology.