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Israeli 10th-Grader Discovers Elegant Geometry Theorem
An anonymous reader writes with a report that: Tamar Barbi, a 10th grade student living in Hod Hasharon, Israel, discovered that the theorem she was using to solve one of the problems on her geometry homework didn't actually exist. With the help of her teacher and mathematicians, she wrote up a proof for the theorem, which helps provide new and more elegant proofs for many other mathematical theorems. Posters at Hacker News have some skeptical words about the theorem's novelty, but also about the phrasing of the news report, which seems to omit some crucial words.
When I went in to see the teacher about it, she said that we used long division and not the new math method of solving the problem.
It's not "new math". New Math is what everyone was bitching about in the 60's, later followed by Reform Math. What you're probably talking about is the Singapore Math system, or one of the other more recent teaching systems.
You, and most people who bitch about "Common Core" math, were not taught to understand math. You were taught to be a calculator, and the teaching was focused on having you memorize a series of tricks which could be used to solve basic problems without really knowing what the fuck you were doing, or why, or why the tricks and shortcuts worked. The idea was that most kids didn't need to actually understand math, because most kids weren't going to go to college or ever learn higher math concepts. The smart kids would figure it out on their own, and people like you would work in factories or fix cars or cook food for a living.
Stupid as far as I am concerned.
No, stupid is people like you who never even bothered to read what those standards say. There's nothing in those standards which tell any school WHAT method of teaching to use. The standards do not dictate how tests are given.
If you have a problem with the teaching method, that's fine- there's plenty of reasons to criticize many methods. But it has jack shit to do with Common Core, and the only thing more annoying than people like you thinking they do, is the fucking idiot teachers who keep repeating it. Hint- if the teacher says or thinks the teaching method is 'Common Core' than she obviously doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about. Chances are, she doesn't even know the name of the system being used, and more to the point she probably doesn't really understand basic Math in the first goddamn place.