A reader sends the above video:
It occurs to me that this isn’t the first time parents like Louis C.K. have been upset about not being able to help their children with their math homework. Remember the New Math movement? Tom Lehrer wrote a song about it. As he sardonically says in the introduction, “The important thing is to understand what you’re doing, not to get the right answer.”
But another reader takes the idea of problem solving more seriously:
I don’t know a whole lot about the Common Core, nor about NCLB. But I am a scientist, so I know that Louis CK is complaining about the form of the questions. No longer is math addition and multiplications, like it was in his school days. No more: 34+98=, 102/3=, or 21×5=. Currently, questions come as paragraphs full of words with the numerical issue hidden in them. So the current math questions are riddles in words that sometimes barely seem to contain numbers. Before getting to the numerical question, kids needs to decipher the question and reduce it to numbers. This adds a layer of complexity to the problem. It also requires problem solving, a life skill much more important than arithmetic. Incidentally, it is a skill that academics have been screaming for for years to get into pre-academic education.
I have taught basic physics at a university. A major frustration is that most students consider physics a numbers game. Get the formula, find the numbers, punch them into your calculator and tada!: an answer. That is not physics. Academics of all stripes face such oversimplification issues. Science and other complex issues are not simple. In modern society, we need people who can tackle complex problems – be it filling out a tax form, evaluating complex personal relations, getting ahead in your job, or redefining the way (paid) news is brought. We need people who can think critically.
Another is on the same page:
My younger son, who at 8 has been taught under Common Core standards since kindergarten, loves math. He loves all the different techniques they are teaching him and has a deeper understanding of math than his older brother, who was taught to memorize math facts. That I don’t know what he is doing half the time is a feature for him, not a bug.
Also, my Ph.D husband just “took” the NY sixth grade Common Core math test posted online and said it is absolutely the way math should be taught, with multi-step problems that require critical thinking. He was just concerned about how it is scored – in his mind, multi-step problems should be graded for partial credit – and if it was perhaps too much to expect of a sixth grader. But he wasn’t sure. He certainly thought the adults who claim they can’t answer the problems are either lying or were woefully unprepared by their schools.
But another reader is worried about how students with disabilities will fare under the new standards:
I don’t like the insinuation by your reader that merely getting the right answer isn’t enough, and that you have to show your work to show you “understand the math.” For someone who struggled to “do well” in math, even though I was very good at it, this makes my blood boil.
Allow me to explain: My fine motor skills are crippled to the point that I can only write by hand at a very slow speed. I remember taking an extra hour or skipping recess just to complete a paper or test – not because I was verbose, but because it took me that long to just to write the same amount of material. After getting this documented and implemented into an IEP/504 plan, I was able to get some accommodation in all my subjects through use of a word processor … except in math.
Math was hell to me, but not because I had problems doing it. In order to compensate for my disability, I learned the formulas enough to calculate the math in my head and use the space provided as scratch paper. I was thus able to get high SAT scores in math (in the 700 range, pre-2004 tests). But math teachers, very similar to your reader, did not like that. They wanted me to “show my work.” The problem with “showing my work” is that it turns what is supposed to be a 30-minute-long assignment into a 90-minute assignment (or sloppy 45-minute one), and made an hour-long homework assignment two and a half hours long, chewing into other subjects. It also made it very hard to stay focused, which made it difficult to get problems right.
Efforts to accommodate me were often ignored, not least because the math teachers had no idea how to handle a disabled student who was actually good at math, and doing it by computer was obviously out of the question. I was a C student for the most part, except in the two years I had one teacher who did accommodate me, and my first-year calculus course in college, which was taught by a disabled professor.
Common Core tests will be administered by computer, so maybe that will make life easier for a new generation of disabled students. Or maybe that will create new problems; a reader who graduated from high school in 2006 says his experience with proficiency exams left him skeptical:
One day in my 11th-grade AP English class, our teacher had us read a few essays other kids had written for our state assessment exams. We were provided with the definitions of the scoring structure and asked to apply the correct label to each of the four essays. We all easy identified the “needs improvement” and “advanced” essays, but when it came to identifying the “basic” and the “proficient” essay, almost all of us switched the two. Why? Because while both of the essays showed about the same level of comprehension, the “proficient” one was overly complicated in a way that detracted from the content, while the “basic” essay was straight to the point. With these Common Core standards, it looks like the feds and the states are doubling down on useless confusion.
Read the entire discussion thread here.
The Dish 