2+2=What? Parents rail against Common Core math

It sends them a very nice rejection letter, as Heinlein notes in his 1958 Have Space Suit---Will Travel (his juveniles were intended to teach readers what they needed to know to go out into space, from attitudes to what they needed to learn. The latter was touched upon in the first, the 1947 Rocket Ship Galileo, this book gave it a very thorough treatment in the beginning when the (genius, scientist, etc.) father of the protagonist realized how awful was the public school education he was getting).

And as I can attest, there's this nice bit about how they have many fewer spaces than qualified applicants, not going into the minor detail of if you were one of the latter (I wasn't).

CalTech is very special, even more so than MIT I gather (I'm Class of '83 of the latter). Much smaller, 1/4 the class size (~250 vs. 1100), much more intense, much more science focused. Someone, commenting on how they'll clean up your room every week (a service MIT is sadly lacking in :-), said it was like a Hogwarts for science, and very simply, if you can't do magic at its level, they don't accept you.

For some historical perspective, as I understand it, at the post-Civil War beginning of MIT, most students were mastering the calculus by the end of their undergraduate program.

(And our "freaky" unit numbering is great, totally transparent, and at least at MIT there's a committee dedicated to the task of keeping professors and departments in line with the Institute's limits on work demanded, and has been known to take classes away from abusive professors. That's also done at the departmental level, as I witnessed one semester while on the EECS department's staff (took over and finished the sysadmin part of the job of moving it from Multics to UNIX(TM), with the help of one on and off student like me who was an old friend).)

Seems the problem is those creating the curriculum likewise have a poor grasp of it and of how to present it to inexperienced minds. They know that "concepts" and "process" and "psychology" are important, but lack the Tufte- and Feynman-like grasp of how to present the complex in simple clear ways.

Ooh. 28 submission points for 104 comments. I'm glad that the submitter submitted the article. On the other hand, it may be correct (as is apparently the judgment of most participants here) that the article just isn't that informative. See an important article from The Atlantic, "Confusing Math Homework? Don’t Blame the Common Core: States, districts, and schools are actually in charge"[1] for more on what's really going in classrooms around the country.

Some of the comments here refer to a period of "reform math" instruction BEFORE the introduction of the Common Core State Standards in mathematics,[2] which are actually quite recent. Implementation of the Common Core in school classrooms in the United States is only a year or two old today. The Common Core was an attempt to introduce coherency and logical progression into the mishmash of topics that characterized "reform math" textbooks such as Everyday Math (which is probably the best and most mathematically sound of the reform math textbooks) and TERC: Investigations, among other titles. The Common Core standards are generally regarded, as curriculum standards, as a plain improvement over what most states set as mathematics curriculum standards before.[3] On the other hand, many of the mathematics who criticized the preceding period of "reform math" instruction (basically most United States school practice in the twenty-first century) think that the current Common Core textbooks and teacher training courses still don't go far enough in improving instruction.

As a parent, I expect and welcome school instruction in any topic that is better and more research-based than what I received as a child. The quotations from parents in the article kindly submitted here along the lines of "Why should my child be expected to learn things I don't understand?" seems like a very bizarre approach to parenting to me. (As a homeschooling parent, I used the Miquon Math[4] and Singapore Primary Mathematics series[5] with great success in helping my four children learn their elementary mathematics. They have been able to go on to more advanced mathematics study with relative ease. I had to learn new topics and new techniques to use those materials, but that is good for me. I was lucky that my wife, educated in Taiwan, largely understands the approach taken in the Singapore materials, but so far both of our older two sons have gone well beyond the mathematics study level of either of their parents. Education is supposed to improve from generation to generation, or what are schools for? (That's why we homeschool--we lay a good foundation for our children with the best available curricular materials to get them ready for classes with teachers who know what they are doing for our children's secondary education.)

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/confusi...

[2] http://www.corestandards.org/Math/

[3] http://educationnext.org/the-common-core-math-standards/

[4] http://miquonmath.com/

[5] http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39....

Searching the internet should bring up several places to buy the Singapore Math books. There is an official site[1]. The books come two per grade level, for example 3A and 3B. They are small books, but filled with content. They only cost about $12 each. There are also workbooks available (for more exercises, but you might not need these) and some teaching guides too (that I'm unfamiliar with). For someone that was in elementary school 50 years ago, the math lessons look very familiar. There was one subject covered for which I wished there was more explanation: translating word problems into equations to be solved. This always came easily to me (I ended up majoring in Math in college), but Singapore Math has an interesting step that seems to work well for kids. They translate the word problems into a standard diagram where rectangles stand in for quantities and then the equations are derived from the diagrams. I wasn't taught that way, and so I wasn't sure how to motivate the correct construction of the rectangles. Don't let this minor complaint disuade you from trying Singapore Math. Consider the latest international rankings of students, the PISA [2]. Singapore is one from the top (Shanghai-China is number one), and as I understand it, all students in Singapore take the test so there is no selection bias. Furthermore, their books are in English while all the other top rated countries (China, Korea, Japan, Switzerland, etc.) have text books that I can't read.

[1]http://www.singaporemath.com [2]http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-snaps...

The goal of Common Core is a good one. But the research was not nearly thorough enough. The curriculum was adopted all at once instead of giving it any testing.

And at least in my area, students must take the math class at their age level, at least through elementary school. Now students that excel at math get bored and hate it, and students who need extra help can't get it. That is the wrong way to improve education.