Im sorry, but teaching Math is my passion. I can recall the uproar when NEW MATH came in the 60s and everybody y hated it. it was the worst thing ever. nobody knew what NEW MATH was, but it must be the Devils invention. The new COMMON CORE math has some good ideas and also some bad ones. But, what I hate to see is one MEME used to describe the entire curriculum. As a former junior high math teacher, I incorporated music, movies, trips outside, M&Ms, origami, paper air planes, string art, baseball stats, and many other really strange things into my lesson plans. But I also included the fundamental math as well. if you were to come to my classroom on a day we were eating M&Ms you would scream what is Mr. Bigelow teaching my child ? And the same is true with many of the internet memes that are shared. They reflect a snapshot of one part of one lesson. The problem is the public is never afforded the opportunity to see the entire picture. The same could be said with any class. if you took one random day and entered a music class, Im quite sure you would scream and say what is my child learning ? You dont get the chance to see the final product in just one visit. The CORE math curriculum does include a lot of the old principle math problems like 4 x5000 = ? But it also includes some new methods as well. However, with everything, is not as bad as people say it is, and for some students, they can grasp the concepts without it. In college, my calculus professor would accept the right answer, and if we got it wrong, but showed our steps, hed give us partial credit. A lot of people who are old school hated geometry proofs because we had to write out all those steps and definitions of SAS, and cosine and stuff. And we all hated story problems. And thats basically what common core math is all about. To me its biggest problem is it is taking the concepts and steps of what we did in junior high and high school, and including some of them into the elementary school math curriculum, and many of the elementary students are not able to grasp the concepts. What was not understood when this concept was implemented is that over half of a classes students reading comprehension level is not at their grade level. many students in 6th grade have a 4th grade reading level. And where they used to succeed in math and have difficulty in reading, they are now experiencing difficulty I both because their math is becoming more dependent on reading. in the long run, it will improve the ability of those students who enter college. But its going to make a lot of average students even worse.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 01:26:03 +0000