None of these “education” idiots have any background in the sciences:
A new trend in math at elementary schools around the country has parents pulling out their hair. Mainly because it is the opposite of how most of today’s adults were taught to do simple multiplication in the first place.
According to a Common Core math worksheet that’s gone viral, an elementary child today cannot just say, “5 x 3 = 15.” Instead they have to change the multiplication problem to addition before solving the equation. However, if the child says, “5 + 5 + 5 = 15,” they will still lose points because the problem must be written as it is stated. In this case, “five times three” is really stated as “five groups of three,” and has to be written as such: “3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 15.”
This concept has left many parents shaking their heads and throwing their hands up in despair because they can’t figure out what it is that their child is supposed to do… “Does it even matter?”
I have no doubt you can measure how good someone is at math by testing how fast they say, “72” after you say, “eight times nine.” If you have one guy who starts counting on his fingers, and looks at the ceiling as he mumbles, “plus eight is nine, ten, eleven, twelve…. wait, I lost my place,” that guy is going to have trouble doing derivatives and calculating the area under the curve.
Even worse, that type of mastery is what these kids should be shooting for. If you can zip through a test, because the material is so ingrained that you can pop out correct answers in half the time in your head, tests become fun, and you begin to enjoy striving to master your material. That was when I began to enjoy math. But if you learn the material and get failed, for not writing a five page dissertation of arbitrary minutia, that will turn you off on education.
I am not sure if these educators who come up with this are just clueless, if they want to inure children to arbitrary statist demands to do stupid things, or if they are trying to standardize the idiocy among everyone. After all, if the kid who was going to be a prodigy fails every test until he does things exactly like the inbred retard in the corner with two teeth, the rabbit has effectively disbanded the evil capitalist grading system where the kids who learn the material actually get better grades than the kids who do not. This does put all the kids at the same retarded level.
Monitor your kid’s schooling, because if these idiots are given free reign, they will destroy your child’s joy at the thought of learning. That will be the beginning of the end of your child’s future.
Apocalypse cometh™
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
Or just home-school your kids and leave public education to the “special-needs” students. “Oh, but the schools in our town would never teach such nonsense!” Sure, that’s what all parents say until their kids come home and tell them gay marriage is real and God isn’t.
Some of them are doing it on purpose, but most of them aren’t. What we’re seeing here is a consequence of focusing on equal outcomes inside of a top-heavy, bureaucratic system designed specifically by the Prussians for cognitive stratification. The inputs are contradictory, so the output is nonsense.
In math, it is good to teach the concrete things like 3*5 = 5 + 5 + 5. But you have to progress to the abstraction or you can’t get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, and this is where the slow kids get lost and left behind. The solution is not “make everything concrete”, but rather to put people on learning schedules that make sense for their smarts.
It’s even worse than that. Multiplication is NOT repeated addition. If it was, then multiplying one half (1/2) by one third (1/3) would be an addition problem, but one sixth (1/6) is still less than either of its factors. Common Core is setting kids up to fail in later math.
I’ve been saying for years that kids love learning like crackheads love crack. That means that public education is so bad at its job that it is like a crackhead buying crack, smoking it, and then saying, “you know what, I would rather just be clean.”
The original report is baloney. My wife teaches 4th grade and, trying to Cliff’s Notes this topic, Common Core requires teachers to teach several (5) different approaches to multiplication but after about a week of intro’ing the different ones, students are encouraged to pick the one that works best for them and stick with it. The right answer, not the method, is the goal.
That said, the reason for all this is the real issue. It is the “Special Ed Inclusion Model” that drives this “give-them-different-ways-to-do-math” confusion, because the non-traditional approaches are more for people who can’t do mental computation.
Concerns over Common Core are a Red Herring. The utter destruction of Public School was embedded at its wicked origin, but the tsunami of collapse is led by putting mentally retarded and autistic kids into the “regular” classroom. It is utter folly to expect +2 and +1 SD kids to be properly guided in the same classroom as -1 and -2 SD kids. The predictable result is that the teacher’s time and teaching materials are all absorbed by dealing with kids who are incapable of keeping up.
Each class grinds to the lowest level which, if you thought school boring before, imagine if your 4th grade class (for example) is running at a 1st grade pace. The average and brighter kids get bored and learn to act out. SpEd inclusion is THE most destructive stupidity to EVER hit collectivist education.
And you NEVER hear about it, do you?
I have no doubt that Common Core isn’t being taught as intended. That should be baked into any system — that the teachers (overall) are going to screw it up. Teaching schools (along with Journalism schools) attract the absolute bottom of the SAT pile, and end up with the most marginal, lowest IQ students. They get some good students, but they get ALL the dumb students.
And then they graduate them with teaching certificates and send them out to enstupify the next generation with their stupidness.
We’re fighting over the tactics (curriculum) when we should be talking logistics (the fact that the vast majority of our delivery mechanisms — the teachers — are incompetent at best and likely active saboteurs.)
Hey AC, what do you think about r/K and millennials? I’ve read surveys that say younger people have ill-defined political beliefs, or sometimes they are 2/3s liberal and other times they are 3/4 conservative or whatnot. What do you make of this and what does r and K look like in millennials vs the boomers and xers?