• axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        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