A Common Core Repeal - one Small Victory

[Tim Steelersfan]

Big news. Really big news, if you are as against Common Core (aka, the Government Indoctrination Program) as I am. May many more states follow.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/07/15/okla-supreme-court-upholds-common-core-repeal/

 

[Southern Steeler]

Good.......

 

[Vader]

I've been fighting CC for over a year now. My sons math home work is ignorance on display. How anyone with half a brain could come up with a more convoluted way of "explaining" math is beyond me.

 

[Southern Steeler]

At this point, anything that gives a middle finger to the government is not only applauded, but encouraged.

 

[Ron Burgundy]

I sent my daughter to a private Christian high school but that's like paying twice. Vastly better education than the public school in my town which is losing students left and right to a local charter school.

 

[Supersteeler]

I've been fighting CC for over a year now. My sons math home work is ignorance on display. How anyone with half a brain could come up with a more convoluted way of "explaining" math is beyond me.

Man, we might not agree on much but I am with you 100% on that. How is it better for a kid to use 20 nonsensical steps to solve a problem than it is to do it in 3 steps that actually make sense? I have to wait for my wife to come home to my son's Math with him because I will screw him all up teaching it in a way that makes sense to me. Then she does it in crazy rhymes and steps that seem ridiculous to me but hey, he has to know how to do it that way in class or get penalized.

Ya got me excited Tim, I thought it was repealed everywhere.

 

[Steeltime]

I sent my daughter to a private Christian high school but that's like paying twice. Vastly better education than the public school in my town which is losing students left and right to a local charter school.

My kids went to Catholic grade schools and high schools, as did I many years ago.

Both are very intelligent, thoughtful, capable of critical thought, dubious of pleas to emotion and "higher power," and did very well in extremely demanding colleges.

Public schools have the resources to turn good students into great students, but seem overwhelmed with a focus on turning mediocre students into terrible students. Polo exemplified on a regular basis the sad state of literacy in modern-day America.

 

[Hineswardkickedurpanzyass]

I literally yelled at my son's assistant Principal last year because he got a math problem correct. She said he didn't show his work and that he could not have possibly come up with the right answer without doing the work. He was sitting in the hall and I called him in. Gave him an even tougher problem and he solved it in his head. Told the Principal that my son should not be punished because he was clearly smarter than her. That was the closest I have ever come to punching a ***** in the face.

My dad who was an elementary school Principal for over 30 years laughed and said to not do that again after I told him about it.

 

[Steelr4evr]

When you elect commies you get commie core. This government needs a massive political enema.

 

[Rod Farva]

I literally yelled at my son's assistant Principal last year because he got a math problem correct. She said he didn't show his work and that he could not have possibly come up with the right answer without doing the work. He was sitting in the hall and I called him in. Gave him an even tougher problem and he solved it in his head. Told the Principal that my son should not be punished because he was clearly smarter than her. That was the closest I have ever come to punching a ***** in the face.

My dad who was an elementary school Principal for over 30 years laughed and said to not do that again after I told him about it.

No offense, but in this case, I think your Dad may have given you bad advice. I would do it again. And again. And again.

 

[Tim Steelersfan]

No offense, but in this case, I think your Dad may have given you bad advice. I would do it again. And again. And again.

Agreed. I've gone to the school over Common Core in my own little one on one protests. Luckily, my youngest son's 5th grade teacher this past year was wholly Conservative, a fantastic (pretty) teacher, young and against Common Core. Everyone in Maryland is a swinging limp dick liberal save for 6 or 7 of us. She was one. It was a relief. She said she may switch careers as her conscience won't allow her to continue to "indoctrinate" the children while not teaching and/or preparing them.

Anywho, this past year there was a Protest Common Core day across the nation, where parents in opposition were supposed to keep their kids home for a day and home school their kids instead. It was two weeks after our parent-teacher conference, and during the conference I said to said-teacher, "Were you aware of the Protest Common Core day?"

That day comes and I keep the kids home. Wife is all like "You're telling the school, I'm not." I called both schools, said the kids were sick, that's it. I didn't want to say "They are out in protest" and have them penalized, so I took the "sick" route, though everyone knew what was up.

I often work from home. That day, I had them watch a documentary on Netflix, I dictated two hours of reading time, then we did "home education" - I taught them how to do things like laundry (one didn't know how), how to make a certain type of lunch, we fixed something that was broken in the home, etc.

At the end of the day, my oldest son looked at me and said "Thanks Dad. I thought today would be a waste of time, etc. But I learned more today than I learn in a week at school."

I truly thought he was bullshitting me. I said "Really?" "Yep, really" he replied. Sad.

What was cute is the youngest went to school the next day. Mrs. Teacher, when not a lot of students were around, leans in towards him, smiles and says "You weren't really sick yesterday were you?" while she winked. My youngest paused (caught off guard for a second) then smiled back and whispered "nah..I wasn't sick." The teacher smiled and said "Good" and nodded. I thought that was cool.

 

[Supersteeler]

Agreed. I've gone to the school over Common Core in my own little one on one protests. Luckily, my youngest son's 5th grade teacher this past year was wholly Conservative, a fantastic (pretty) teacher, young and against Common Core. Everyone in Maryland is a swinging limp dick liberal save for 6 or 7 of us. She was one. It was a relief. She said she may switch careers as her conscience won't allow her to continue to "indoctrinate" the children while not teaching and/or preparing them.

Anywho, this past year there was a Protest Common Core day across the nation, where parents in opposition were supposed to keep their kids home for a day and home school their kids instead. It was two weeks after our parent-teacher conference, and during the conference I said to said-teacher, "Were you aware of the Protest Common Core day?"

That day comes and I keep the kids home. Wife is all like "You're telling the school, I'm not." I called both schools, said the kids were sick, that's it. I didn't want to say "They are out in protest" and have them penalized, so I took the "sick" route, though everyone knew what was up.

I often work from home. That day, I had them watch a documentary on Netflix, I dictated two hours of reading time, then we did "home education" - I taught them how to do things like laundry (one didn't know how), how to make a certain type of lunch, we fixed something that was broken in the home, etc.

At the end of the day, my oldest son looked at me and said "Thanks Dad. I thought today would be a waste of time, etc. But I learned more today than I learn in a week at school."

I truly thought he was bullshitting me. I said "Really?" "Yep, really" he replied. Sad.

What was cute is the youngest went to school the next day. Mrs. Teacher, when not a lot of students were around, leans in towards him, smiles and says "You weren't really sick yesterday were you?" while she winked. My youngest paused (caught off guard for a second) then smiled back and whispered "nah..I wasn't sick." The teacher smiled and said "Good" and nodded. I thought that was cool.

Every teacher I know or work with absolutely despises the common core and thinks it's a complete waste. However, every one of them are evaluated based on how they teach it and their job literally depends on it. It was made up by Politicians who think they know everything about everything, not Educators.

 

[oneforthebus]

I literally yelled at my son's assistant Principal last year because he got a math problem correct. She said he didn't show his work and that he could not have possibly come up with the right answer without doing the work. He was sitting in the hall and I called him in. Gave him an even tougher problem and he solved it in his head. Told the Principal that my son should not be punished because he was clearly smarter than her. That was the closest I have ever come to punching a ***** in the face.

My dad who was an elementary school Principal for over 30 years laughed and said to not do that again after I told him about it.

I have had the same issue with my son, although I after I got him the show his work, he still got points off for doing them the way he had learned the first three years of school, and not by drawing a bunch of boxes or splitting up the numbers into groups or whatever stupid **** he was supposed to do.

 

[JupiterBnG]

I'm opposed to common core, but I'm also opposed to federal or state governments involved in creating the curriculum. Federal or state oversight should be limited to setting a certain level of expectation or a policy direction, but educators should be the ones figuring out how best to implement those goals in their communities. Education is not a "one size fits all" proposition. The other problem with government involvement is that it becomes less about educating children and more about allocating dollars.

 

[Vader]

I'm opposed to common core, but I'm also opposed to federal or state governments involved in creating the curriculum. Federal or state oversight should be limited to setting a certain level of expectation or a policy direction, but educators should be the ones figuring out how best to implement those goals in their communities. Education is not a "one size fits all" proposition. The other problem with government involvement is that it becomes less about educating children and more about allocating dollars.

Which is why the dept. of Education is a clusterfuck. It just sucks money out of the federal budget while doing absolutely nothing. It only exists for the purpose of creating government jobs. It has no practical function at all.

 

[Rod Farva]

I'm opposed to common core, but I'm also opposed to federal or state governments involved in creating the curriculum. Federal or state oversight should be limited to setting a certain level of expectation or a policy direction, but educators should be the ones figuring out how best to implement those goals in their communities. Education is not a "one size fits all" proposition. The other problem with government involvement is that it becomes less about educating children and more about allocating dollars.

I'd go even further Jupiter.......much further. Standards and oversight should be the purview of locally elected school boards imo because they are more familiar with the needs of their students and are locally elected, therefore locally accountable making them "in loco parentis" in a very limited sense.

Which is why the dept. of Education is a clusterfuck. It just sucks money out of the federal budget while doing absolutely nothing. It only exists for the purpose of creating government jobs. It has no practical function at all.

One of the biggest scams ever perpetrated by government is the establishment of the DOE. Nothing but a bureaucratic financial sink hole and another means to extort the people.

 

[JupiterBnG]

I'd go even further Jupiter.......much further. Standards and oversight should be the purview of locally elected school boards imo because they are more familiar with the needs of their students and are locally elected, therefore locally accountable making them "in loco parentis" in a very limited sense.

Allow me to clarify my previous statement, because I agree more with what you're saying than you seem to think. When I say expectations or policy should be set at a federal or state level, I mean it in the sense that that level of government should administer tax revenues earmarked for education, and set policy in only the very highest sense, like, "there should be a greater focus on math and science proficiency." School districts should allocate money on the local level, as well as set the curriculum deemed necessary to meet that policy goal handed down from the state/federal level. I don't want the state or federal government creating standards or designing the curriculum, but their purpose IS to understand the needs of the taxpaying public, and set the direction. The CEO at Google doesn't look at every line of code the company produces; he or she says "this is the kind of service or product we need to offer to continue to be successful," and lots of other people, who are EXPERTS at what they do, go off and do those things to make it happen.

 

[Rod Farva]

Gotcha.....we're pretty like minded on the issue. I like limited local governance on most issues rather than the insanely out of touch feds.

 

[tapeANaspirin2it]

People are thinking of common core the wrong way. They are making the mistake of thinking that common core is a sincere attempt at education that went awry.

It has nothing to do with education. It is about social justice. Liberals look at everything in terms of raw numbers of people in various areas. They see that women and minorities (and remember Asians and Jews don't count as minorities in the liberal mind) are vastly outnumbered in the areas of math and science degrees and jobs.

A normal person does not see a problem here. They just know it's a collection of individual choices. Women are not barred from taking math classes in college, they simply prefer other majors.

but the liberal does not believe in choice. They see everything in terms of a scale and it needs to be balanced no matter what.

The other component of common core is that while liberals paint themselves as champions of women and minorities, they are actually prejudiced against them. Their base assumption is that women and minorities need extra help in various areas because they couldn't possibly compete with white males otherwise.

If liberals actually believed that women and minorities were just as smart as white people then they would concentrate their efforts on making sure women and minorities get access to the same education as their evil white counterparts.

But they don't do that. They don't try to raise people up. Instead they focus on lowering the standards. They will say all the right things about being inclusive and helping but just consider the base reasoning behind lowering standards. You do it because you don't think they could hit that standard otherwise.


Here is where common core comes from. They see that not enough women and minorities are choosing math and science as a career path, so instead of beefing up their teaching in these areas, they instead change the whole way it is taught so that ON PAPER in a few years there will be a rise in test scores.

That is the goal, to even the scales. They do not care if the students who have learned the common core curriculum can actually apply these skills in the real world. They only care about them looking even on paper.

 

[Vader]

CC makes absolutely no sense to me. How is making simple math more difficult and even less logical, helping minorities? If anything it will make them less likely to want to study advanced mathematics. Hell if take takes 20 minutes to figure out 2+2= 4 then who in the hell is going to want to do differential equations? They won't even try.

I understand CC's concept and don't totally disagree with basic standards. But over time policy people got involved and there were ZERO educators in the planning stages. To me it is simple. Just teach basics early on and add things as you go along. This isn't ******* brain surgery.

 

[tapeANaspirin2it]

Because they think figuring it out the normal way is just too hard for many people to grasp. Their solution is to come up with a convoluted, less mathematic way of eventually arriving at a solution. Basically, they think more kids will be able to solve problems with the nonsense CC method than the logical mathematical method.

So, they figure now that more kids are getting good grades in math because they've removed the critical thinking aspect, a broader range of kids will choose careers in math and science fields because they got good grades in it.

On paper, they will be great candidates, despite the fact that in the real world they will be completely unprepared and more and more tech jobs will be outsourced. But liberals don't care about the real world. They care about what they can sell to keep themselves in control.

they will point to the rise in their bogus test scores as proof that CC works. Then the will demonize businesses for hiring foreigners over supposedly well qualified Americans. Then they will convince these manipulated kids that they are victims and that it is evil big business holding them back, and not the fact that a guy from India can do a problem in his head in 2 seconds that takes a CC kid 10 minutes.

 

[Vader]

But in reality more kids are failing math. CC is harder than real math. It makes no sense. Also since CC is only pre-high school math there is no way these kids can pass HS algebra, algebra II, cal or trig. I still don't understand why liberals would make it more difficult for minorities. You'd think they would want to dumb down the standard rather than make it so convoluted that the people they want to succeed can't. I just don't understand it.

 

[JupiterBnG]

But in reality more kids are failing math. CC is harder than real math. It makes no sense. Also since CC is only pre-high school math there is no way these kids can pass HS algebra, algebra II, cal or trig. I still don't understand why liberals would make it more difficult for minorities. You'd think they would want to dumb down the standard rather than make it so convoluted that the people they want to succeed can't. I just don't understand it.

Common Core isn't harder than real math. Once you understand it, it actually makes a lot of sense, and does generally reflect the way most people do practical math in their head - by figuring out how much you need to get up to the nearest multiple of 5 or 10, then counting multiples of five/ten, and adding the last few units to get the answer. The problem is that if you don't already have complete mastery over the simple addition, you are stuck floundering around trying to figure out what the other steps mean.

I, and I suspect most people here, learned basic arithmetic by rote. You learned times tables, and added 2 + 6 and 6 + 2 and 4 + 3 and 7 + 1 and 2 + 1 and so forth until it was all just second nature. Nobody learns arithmetic by jumping in with 452 + 937. The common core folks would have us believe that that's a bad way to learn, and that kids NEED to have a more "natural" explanation. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with learning basic arithmetic by rote, other than the fact that the smart kids who get it quicker are bored sooner. To me, that doesn't suggest we need to teach math differently, it suggests that we need to better gage each child's progress and keep advancing them to a level that keeps them challenged and learning. Of course, then you have to deal with all the "why isn't my little Johnny in the smart kids group too?" bullshit. Ultimately it all circles back to the PC, everyone-gets-a-trophy-so-no-one-gets-their-feelings-hurt farce.

 

[Rod Farva]

ultimately it all circles back to the pc, everyone-gets-a-trophy-so-no-one-gets-their-feelings-hurt farce.

bing-freaking-o!

 

[Vader]

Common Core isn't harder than real math. Once you understand it, it actually makes a lot of sense, and does generally reflect the way most people do practical math in their head - by figuring out how much you need to get up to the nearest multiple of 5 or 10, then counting multiples of five/ten, and adding the last few units to get the answer. The problem is that if you don't already have complete mastery over the simple addition, you are stuck floundering around trying to figure out what the other steps mean.

I, and I suspect most people here, learned basic arithmetic by rote. You learned times tables, and added 2 + 6 and 6 + 2 and 4 + 3 and 7 + 1 and 2 + 1 and so forth until it was all just second nature. Nobody learns arithmetic by jumping in with 452 + 937. The common core folks would have us believe that that's a bad way to learn, and that kids NEED to have a more "natural" explanation. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with learning basic arithmetic by rote, other than the fact that the smart kids who get it quicker are bored sooner. To me, that doesn't suggest we need to teach math differently, it suggests that we need to better gage each child's progress and keep advancing them to a level that keeps them challenged and learning. Of course, then you have to deal with all the "why isn't my little Johnny in the smart kids group too?" bullshit. Ultimately it all circles back to the PC, everyone-gets-a-trophy-so-no-one-gets-their-feelings-hurt farce.

Sorry but that isn't close to true. My son brings that **** home every day. It isn't the way anybody every learned math. Here is a reading problem taken from the CC:

Juanita wants to give bags of stickers to all her friends. She is not sure if she needs 4 bags or 6 bags. How many stickers could she buy so there are no stickers left over

Now please show me how easy that answer is for you. And that's just one of hundreds of examples I have from my experience.

BTW I have a M.A. degree and have taken many upper level math classes.