Interesting post I saw on common core math (btw, this thread is the very first I've heard of it so I have zero understanding of what it actually is):
It's also worth noting that arithmetic itself is a really basic skill that's not really very important in the grand scheme of things (you can just use a calculator for it, after all), and as such using it for helping people understand number concepts as opposed to focusing on speed (which is obviously pointless when calculators are instantaneous) makes a lot of sense. Whether or not their teaching methods actually help students arrive at said understanding is obviously beyond me, but, again, I can see the method behind the madness.
Quote:The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) not only rated countries by mathematics achievement, but also examined math instruction in the top-performing countries. My understanding is that the NCTM has been guided by these findings. One thing the TIMSS found is that effective teaching doesn't always look the same. Some countries used calculators and real-world problems effectively. Others, like Japan, did not. But what all the high achieving countries had in common is that solving math problems was about focusing on understanding connections and concepts over procedure. In the classrooms studied in the United States, however, problems were always implemented as procedural exercises.I can actually see the logic in this, since I personally had a difficult time with math simply because so much of the curriculum consisted of rote memorization of formulas and patterns instead of giving me an understanding of the underlying math.
What the seemingly convoluted methods of the CC do is allow students to build connections and construct solutions based on their understanding of how numbers work. The procedures and algorithms of the past gave us efficient plug in formulas for solving problems but left us without any understanding of why our solutions were correct, or incorrect. And if we forgot a procedure, we had nothing to fall back on.
As a former secondary math teacher I saw this frequently when students tried to find sums, products of fractions. They remembered being taught a procedure called cross-multiplication, or cross-products, but they never understood the algebra on which it is based. So they would misapply it to products of fractions rather than using to solve proportions. The same proportion that can be solved using the cross product gimmick can be solved more efficiently by simply understanding that multiplying equivalent fractions by the same number results in another pair of equivalent fractions. Think of geometric formulas. If you know what perimeter is, or area, you don't need to memorize a formula. On the Va. Grade 6 SOL students are given a formula sheet. The formula for finding perimeter of a rectangle is p = 2L + 2W. What? Just add together all the sides.
It's also worth noting that arithmetic itself is a really basic skill that's not really very important in the grand scheme of things (you can just use a calculator for it, after all), and as such using it for helping people understand number concepts as opposed to focusing on speed (which is obviously pointless when calculators are instantaneous) makes a lot of sense. Whether or not their teaching methods actually help students arrive at said understanding is obviously beyond me, but, again, I can see the method behind the madness.
