Some of the people opposing this include very educated folks like engineers. So don't think that the only people who oppose Common Core are people who are uneducated.
Pretty much the very last people on the planet who should be deciding how young children are taught math are people with engineering degrees. Engineers are taught an especially mindless point of view on what math is and how it is important, and walk away with an entirely undeserved sense of superiority about their insight. This is precisely what I mean about people "who don't even understand that they don't understand." It often actually gets worse with higher levels of education, ironically enough.
As far as I can tell, the extremely shrill, extremely ideological opposition to Common Core is the educational equivalent of NIMBY-ism: reactionary opposition to change of any kind, supported by robot-like repetition of a set of rote talking points like "high-stakes testing", and accompanied by mob-like behavior at public meetings. Reason and debate end when this kind of total ideological certainty prevails.
EngageNY is idiotic with math. There's no more working with numbers. If you have 1.62 divided by 0.27, you don't actually do the math. Instead, you draw 162 little boxes. Then you circle them in groups of 27. Then you count how many circled groups there are to get your answer.
The more I see parents bringing up stuff like this as to how "stupid" the Common Core math curriculum is, the more I realize that the fundamental problem is that the parents aren't educated well enough to understand why this is a good way to teach math. Which is a great argument for a new way of doing things: the old way of doing things apparently utterly failed with these parents, who don't even understand that they don't understand.
Remember when the NSA was secretly changing widely-used crypto algortithms to make them stronger? I'm thinking of the DES sbox and differential cryptanalysis.
One thing's for sure, RSA is toast. They can issue all the denials they want. Nobody's ever going to trust them again.
I DO NOT send my daughter to a govt school that teaches her to grow up to be a lgbt whore without rights. SHE is going to a German school and at home she is learning to despise the government.
Parent is the poster-child for compulsory public education. Some kids need to be rescued from their parents.
For example has anyone successfully managed to explain to a elementary school kid what is the point of learning three different ways to add two numbers?
Perhaps... because learning three different ways to add two numbers aids comprehension of the mathematical concept of addition?
Or the new "Common Core" crap that has the most ass backwards ways of doing simple things like math. http://static.infowars.com/bin... I have seen people with MS and PHd in math shake their heads over this stuff.
The answer is (c). Maybe the people shaking their heads over this stuff have finally succumbed to the brain rot caused by listening to Alex Jones all the time.
You mean like correcting the blatant errors in the grade school science texts?
I sure would like to hear an example of what kind of "blatant error" you're talking about. For every parent that points out that centrifugal force is just as real as any other force, there will be ten who deny evolution or climate change.
Perhaps this is the main effect driving the study: the majority of parents in America are half-educated nitwits, and any involvement from them will only cause damage to their child's education.
So... let's say you're on a funding panel, with 120 grant proposals in front of you, and you have to recommend twenty of them as top priorities for funding. The rest of them are going to go without, because that's all the money you have to allocate. Thirty of those proposals are from established, productive researchers with track records of transformative discoveries. Another thirty are from promising young researchers with first-rate pedigrees looking for their first grants to launch careers that may span decades. Thirty are from mediocre old guys nearing retirement who have been in the funding pipeline forever, and have been getting grants mostly by inertia. Thirty are semi-coherent ravings from people who display very little comprehension of the existing literature or of the basic parameters of the field.
Now find the "mavericks". You have to have a ranked list by tomorrow afternoon.
And, yes, this is how my boys are learning to do math.
My daughter is not in the Common Core yet, but this is how she is learning to do math at home. Last weekend, we worked on prime numbers and factorization with Legos.
Take a stack of twelve legos:
"Can you divide twelve legos into twos?" Kid pulls the stack of twelve into piles of two, with none left over: "YES!"
"Can you divide twelve legos into threes?" Kid pulls stacks of two apart to make stacks of three, with none left over: "YES!"
"Can you divide twelve legos into fours?" Kid pulls four stacks of three apart to make three stacks of four, none left over. "YES!"
"Can you divide twelve legos into fives?" Kid makes two stacks of five, with two blocks left over. "NO!"
Really, invisibleserfscollar.com is ground zero for info on what is happening in the schools. Put up with the complex sentence structure there and read!
I'm sorry: did I say that Right Wing conspiracy nuts think Common Core is an attempt by the Feds to take over the schools? I stand corrected. They think it's a conspiracy by the United Nations to take over the schools.
I'm surprised that web site didn't mention chemtrails.
Story problems certainly have their place, but teach students how to do the actual math first. And keep things relevant, don't confuse first graders by comparing pennies to cups of coffee http://roundtheinkwell.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/the-math-test.pdf
Not sure what you mean by actual math: calculating with numerals? As I understand it, one of the main points of common core is to get away from doing calculations by applying memorized tables of addition/subtraction/multiplication, because that's memorizing, not math. The story problems are the math.
The pennies-to-coffee cups thing in that over-hyped sample test is a little weird, for sure, but the rest of the test appeared entirely reasonable to me. Even though the terminology and notation were unfamiliar to me, I was able to quickly figure out the system and understand how to construct correct answers to the problems. Because I understand math, not just how to calculate.
The Common Core is the one thing in modern politics that is capable of generating agreement between right-wing conspiracy nuts and left-wing conspiracy nuts: the Left hates it because they think it's an attempt to undermine teacher's union, and the Right hates it because they think the Feds are trying to undermine local control of schools. So everybody hates it.
But seriously, have you actrually read the standardds. There's nothing especially objectionable in them, and there is a lot to like. Implementation, particularly an over-emphasis on standardized testing, could well present a problem, but the standards themselves are pretty clearly positive.
Let's see... you're investigating potential war crimes perpetrated by the CIA, so you store all of the records of the investigation on an air-gapped computer system located at a CIA facility in Virginia. What could possibly go wrong?
I know it's heinously non-politically-correct to suggest...
Lost me right there.
I've found over my life that as soon as somebody starts their argument by complaining about "political correctness", it's a virtual certainty that the remainder of their argument is going to be a lame attempt to rationalize an odious bias. It's the politically correct way to start an argument by saying I'm not an X, but...
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the people opposing this include very educated folks like engineers. So don't think that the only people who oppose Common Core are people who are uneducated.
Pretty much the very last people on the planet who should be deciding how young children are taught math are people with engineering degrees. Engineers are taught an especially mindless point of view on what math is and how it is important, and walk away with an entirely undeserved sense of superiority about their insight. This is precisely what I mean about people "who don't even understand that they don't understand." It often actually gets worse with higher levels of education, ironically enough.
EngageNY is idiotic with math. There's no more working with numbers. If you have 1.62 divided by 0.27, you don't actually do the math. Instead, you draw 162 little boxes. Then you circle them in groups of 27. Then you count how many circled groups there are to get your answer.
The more I see parents bringing up stuff like this as to how "stupid" the Common Core math curriculum is, the more I realize that the fundamental problem is that the parents aren't educated well enough to understand why this is a good way to teach math. Which is a great argument for a new way of doing things: the old way of doing things apparently utterly failed with these parents, who don't even understand that they don't understand.
There's also the group that see idiocy all around and, knowing they can't fight it all, fight some battles and toss their arms up on others.
For example, my wife and I are fighting against EngageNY, Common Core, and the high-stakes testing that New York State has implemented.
Sure, that makes sense. Fight scientific illiteracy by opposing any attempt whatsoever to improve education. Way to go.
Remember when the NSA was secretly changing widely-used crypto algortithms to make them stronger? I'm thinking of the DES sbox and differential cryptanalysis.
One thing's for sure, RSA is toast. They can issue all the denials they want. Nobody's ever going to trust them again.
Isn't titanium pyrophoric, sort of like those golf clubs?
While Hydrogen is significantly more dangerous, depending on the overall cost and possible ways to limit the dangers, it may be an option.
I for one welcome the gargantuan exploding lawnmowers to our skies.
... is The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
(I liked the Seamus Heaney version too.)
Duh, the centrifugal force is an effect, not a force in itself. That's what we were taught in physics at least.
Searching, I stand not corrected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And Wikipedia is always right. But xkcd is always righter.
I DO NOT send my daughter to a govt school that teaches her to grow up to be a lgbt whore without rights. SHE is going to a German school and at home she is learning to despise the government.
Parent is the poster-child for compulsory public education. Some kids need to be rescued from their parents.
centrifugal force is just as real as any other force
Well, it's not just as real. It only exists in certain non-inertial frames of reference.
Just like gravity, for example.
For example has anyone successfully managed to explain to a elementary school kid what is the point of learning three different ways to add two numbers?
Perhaps ... because learning three different ways to add two numbers aids comprehension of the mathematical concept of addition?
Nah. It must be a UN conspiracy or something.
=did M.C. Esher write that textbook?
Now that's the kind of textbook I would vigorously advocate for.
Or the new "Common Core" crap that has the most ass backwards ways of doing simple things like math. http://static.infowars.com/bin... I have seen people with MS and PHd in math shake their heads over this stuff.
The answer is (c). Maybe the people shaking their heads over this stuff have finally succumbed to the brain rot caused by listening to Alex Jones all the time.
You mean like correcting the blatant errors in the grade school science texts?
I sure would like to hear an example of what kind of "blatant error" you're talking about. For every parent that points out that centrifugal force is just as real as any other force, there will be ten who deny evolution or climate change.
Perhaps this is the main effect driving the study: the majority of parents in America are half-educated nitwits, and any involvement from them will only cause damage to their child's education.
What is on the actual grant paper is more of a formality.
Not when I'm on the panel.
So ... let's say you're on a funding panel, with 120 grant proposals in front of you, and you have to recommend twenty of them as top priorities for funding. The rest of them are going to go without, because that's all the money you have to allocate. Thirty of those proposals are from established, productive researchers with track records of transformative discoveries. Another thirty are from promising young researchers with first-rate pedigrees looking for their first grants to launch careers that may span decades. Thirty are from mediocre old guys nearing retirement who have been in the funding pipeline forever, and have been getting grants mostly by inertia. Thirty are semi-coherent ravings from people who display very little comprehension of the existing literature or of the basic parameters of the field.
Now find the "mavericks". You have to have a ranked list by tomorrow afternoon.
Good code rarely needs commenting though. Too many comments are often an indicator of poorly organized code.
Dear person who thinks that "good code rarely needs commenting": the entire world wants to beat you senseless with a nine iron.
You're welcome.
And, yes, this is how my boys are learning to do math.
My daughter is not in the Common Core yet, but this is how she is learning to do math at home. Last weekend, we worked on prime numbers and factorization with Legos. Take a stack of twelve legos:
"Can you divide twelve legos into twos?" Kid pulls the stack of twelve into piles of two, with none left over: "YES!"
"Can you divide twelve legos into threes?" Kid pulls stacks of two apart to make stacks of three, with none left over: "YES!"
"Can you divide twelve legos into fours?" Kid pulls four stacks of three apart to make three stacks of four, none left over. "YES!"
"Can you divide twelve legos into fives?" Kid makes two stacks of five, with two blocks left over. "NO!"
Hmm...
Now try eleven legos...
Really, invisibleserfscollar.com is ground zero for info on what is happening in the schools. Put up with the complex sentence structure there and read!
I'm sorry: did I say that Right Wing conspiracy nuts think Common Core is an attempt by the Feds to take over the schools? I stand corrected. They think it's a conspiracy by the United Nations to take over the schools.
I'm surprised that web site didn't mention chemtrails.
Story problems certainly have their place, but teach students how to do the actual math first. And keep things relevant, don't confuse first graders by comparing pennies to cups of coffee http://roundtheinkwell.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/the-math-test.pdf
Not sure what you mean by actual math: calculating with numerals? As I understand it, one of the main points of common core is to get away from doing calculations by applying memorized tables of addition/subtraction/multiplication, because that's memorizing, not math. The story problems are the math.
The pennies-to-coffee cups thing in that over-hyped sample test is a little weird, for sure, but the rest of the test appeared entirely reasonable to me. Even though the terminology and notation were unfamiliar to me, I was able to quickly figure out the system and understand how to construct correct answers to the problems. Because I understand math, not just how to calculate.
Her's a few mor typos to mak you hapy.
The Common Core is the one thing in modern politics that is capable of generating agreement between right-wing conspiracy nuts and left-wing conspiracy nuts: the Left hates it because they think it's an attempt to undermine teacher's union, and the Right hates it because they think the Feds are trying to undermine local control of schools. So everybody hates it.
But seriously, have you actrually read the standardds. There's nothing especially objectionable in them, and there is a lot to like. Implementation, particularly an over-emphasis on standardized testing, could well present a problem, but the standards themselves are pretty clearly positive.
Seriously. The entire story should be modded "troll".
Let's see ... you're investigating potential war crimes perpetrated by the CIA, so you store all of the records of the investigation on an air-gapped computer system located at a CIA facility in Virginia. What could possibly go wrong?
I know it's heinously non-politically-correct to suggest ...
Lost me right there.
I've found over my life that as soon as somebody starts their argument by complaining about "political correctness", it's a virtual certainty that the remainder of their argument is going to be a lame attempt to rationalize an odious bias. It's the politically correct way to start an argument by saying I'm not an X, but...
The last person on the planet I want to have supplying curriculum to children is Rupert Murdoch. He's a one-man ignorance machine.