I had completely forgotten about the obsession with common core. Most of it had to do with opposition to teaching long division in a step-by-step way, right? I remember my uncle freaking out about a video of a woman teaching multiplication by showing how to add sets of numbers. He described it as common core math and for the life of me I can’t understand exactly what conservatives were trying to say. I think the idea was that schools wanted to dumb down math to make everyone pass.
i think the reality was that American education is so poor and kids are so behind that teaching very remedial math is probably an improvement
I think their opposition to common core was as simple as "that wasn’t how I was taught math, therefore it is bad and wrong and shouldn’t be done. With an possible addition of “the kids these days shouldn’t have it easy and should be taught math in the obtuse and terrible way I was.”
To be fair I don’t the parents consider CC to be easier, at least from their limited understanding. It seemed harder and more obtuse because back then all they had to do was carry a number to the next number and not think about why it works.
I was absolute trash at math and my parents has a hard time helping me cause we had to use the methodology taught by the school and ‘show your work’. They said they just wished there was a parent teacher night to teach them this stuff so they could help, cause they would have to reverse engineer how they were taught into the way I was being taught and it was a whole thing. Sometimes the methods were just wayyyy too over explainy as well.
A lot of it came from parents whose children were apparently confused about the methods. It’s understandable to be upset and confused, but to have a crusade about it was really weird to me. Personally I don’t like it, but that’s because I hate math and only see adding numbers as a tool rather than a way to understand the world. But it doesn’t hurt for children to learn in different ways lol
I wonder if common core was the predecessor to CRT. I saw similar albeit lighter reactions to CC back then.
I had completely forgotten about the obsession with common core. Most of it had to do with opposition to teaching long division in a step-by-step way, right? I remember my uncle freaking out about a video of a woman teaching multiplication by showing how to add sets of numbers. He described it as common core math and for the life of me I can’t understand exactly what conservatives were trying to say. I think the idea was that schools wanted to dumb down math to make everyone pass.
i think the reality was that American education is so poor and kids are so behind that teaching very remedial math is probably an improvement
I think their opposition to common core was as simple as "that wasn’t how I was taught math, therefore it is bad and wrong and shouldn’t be done. With an possible addition of “the kids these days shouldn’t have it easy and should be taught math in the obtuse and terrible way I was.”
To be fair I don’t the parents consider CC to be easier, at least from their limited understanding. It seemed harder and more obtuse because back then all they had to do was carry a number to the next number and not think about why it works.
Yeah it is probably just the first, conservatives are the epitome of “They changed it which means it’s bad now.”
I was absolute trash at math and my parents has a hard time helping me cause we had to use the methodology taught by the school and ‘show your work’. They said they just wished there was a parent teacher night to teach them this stuff so they could help, cause they would have to reverse engineer how they were taught into the way I was being taught and it was a whole thing. Sometimes the methods were just wayyyy too over explainy as well.
A lot of it came from parents whose children were apparently confused about the methods. It’s understandable to be upset and confused, but to have a crusade about it was really weird to me. Personally I don’t like it, but that’s because I hate math and only see adding numbers as a tool rather than a way to understand the world. But it doesn’t hurt for children to learn in different ways lol