Condensed, compressed and condescended

It annoys me when I see people *still* bitching about ‘common core’ math. first, it’s a standard of ability, not a teaching methodology. The latest one I keep seeing is looks like a garden folly that appears to be two sheds rotated off axis from other around a common center point.

About 4 years back, I took grades 1-8 of math online using a contemporary curriculum that met the common core requirements. It took about a bit less than a month.

Here’s what I learned:

1) It looks nothing like the way any one older than 30 was taught to do math. The representation of the processes is different, but they are, nonetheless, the same processes. As it turns out, modern math teaching methods do a better job of showing the understructure of mathematics than the way I was taught back in the 80s and 90s – in fact, it looks a lot more like the informal approach to math that I cobbled together as an adult.

2) The method is focused on teaching students a deeper sense of numbers and deriving a solution by manipulating them. What were were taught was a method for producing answers algorithmically, without developing a sense for how that process produced the result. This method is much better at teaching how all the parts work together to produce that result.

3) Unlike the algorithmic approach we were taught, understanding the process well enough to estimate an answer, and then refine the precision of the answer is the focus. With practice, this is a faster approach to *actually working* a problem than trying to recall a rote formula and apply that, once you’ve begun to develop the sense of how number works.

4) By the time I completed the 6th grade CC math course, I had all the mathematical tools I would have needed to build a basic shed – and possibly enough to minimize waste in the materials bill and cut plan. By the end of the 8th grade course, I’d have had more than enough to design the folly-type structure described above. More importantly, I’d have been able to *explain* the what and how of it to another person. via Facebook
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