Common Core Makes Me Sore

When my son was in grade school, beginning in 1999, and he asked for help with his math homework, I realized that schools had changed the language used to describe and talk about math. And because I hadn’t ever been exposed to this new, strange language, this nutty way of talking about math and math problems, I sucked at helping him. When he hit middle school, I was useless to him. Of course, I could DO or SOLVE every problem he presented, but I just couldn’t DO or SOLVE the problem the way he was required to.

I always liked math. A lot. I mean I excelled at math. Arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus…I aced all of them. Why, then, did I find myself incapable of helping my son with his basic math homework?

The question kept me up at night. It had me doubting myself. My son and I butted heads, and suffered hurt and hard feelings toward one another at times. All because of a math curriculum that had fallen into favor for the moment. The method of teaching math to students used during the late 90’s and into the next decade didn’t last. And now we have Common Core, causing another generation of parents and students to learn to hate math. In my view, math is math. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division - these are functions that have no need to be fiddled with. How does a so-called conceptual understanding of how numbers relate to each other add any competence in basic arithmetic?

If you have 5 cookies, then you give three away, you still wind up with 2 cookies left, and you have mastered subtraction! If you have 5 cookies, and you split them each in half, so that you and 9 friends can each have a half a cookie, you are doing fractions! How you talk about these numerical truths should NOT make them harder to understand. Especially from the parents’ point of view.

If schools and curriculum force parents to give up helping their students with homework, do students benefit? If schools and curriculum lead to family fights, and tears and disruption, do students benefit? If schools and curriculum create a distance between parents and students, and result in a complete inability to talk about math together, do students benefit? I think not.

Given the current dismal state of American academic achievement, and our notable failure to produce scientists and mathematicians in recent decades, it seems that fiddling around with the language of math has only weakened our ability to communicate about, and with, numbers.

How best to fix the problem is, of course, the biggest problem. Education advocates seem to have stuck on the idea that we need new programs to maximize a student’s potential for learning, and yet each new program seems underwhelming. While there may be numerous ways to repair the system, it seems that our focus on testing does more harm than good. Teachers find they only teach in preparation of tests, rather than having time to fully explore topics, especially those that engage kids. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with assigning math homework, for instance, that includes dozens of problems, rather than the 5 or fewer I saw in my son’s grade school homework. Assigning too few problems seemed silly at the time, since competence in any skill is only won through diligence and effort.

image credit teamuptutors.com

Maybe our biggest problem is that parents need classes just to understand the WAY their children are expected to solve a math problem nowadays.