Another aspect of Common Core that surprised me was the emphasis given to parent functions and transformations. People over forty years of age, even techies such as physicists, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians, wont know what parent functions are. People under thirty-five who have been educated in reform mathematics textbooks will be surprised that is possible to learn mathematics without learning about transformations. Fifty years ago, transformations were not taught, although math-bright students would figure them out for themselves in analytic geometry (second-semester pre-calculus). Today, they are taught systematically beginning in elementary school. The treatment of transformations reminds me of the New Math debacle of the 1960s. The reform mathematicians of the day decided that they were going to improve mathematical education by teaching all students what the math-bright children figured out for themselves. In exactly the same way, the current crop of reform math educators has decided that transformations are an essential underlying principle, and are teaching them: laboriously, painfully, and unnecessarily. They are tormenting and confusing the average student, and depriving the math-bright student of the delight of discovering underlying principles for herself. One aspect of Common Core that did not surprise me was a heavy reliance on calculators. The main problem I see with my algebra students is that they have poor number sense. They cant tell whether the answer their calculator shows is reasonable or not. They cling to the notion that 1.41 is somehow more precise than square root of two. They also cant add fractions or do long division, which puts them at a severe disadvantage when they must add rational expressions or divide polynomials. Common Core exacerbates this problem. At every level, the problems are designed to be too hard to solve by hand. A calculator is necessary even in elementary school – unless a child is to spend 5 hours a night on homework. A graphing calculator is necessary for algebra – calculating correlation coefficients by hand is not a viable option. My students are whizzes with their calculators. But they reach for them to square 1/3...then write it as 0.11. Common Core advocates claim that they are avoiding that boring, rote drill in favor of higher-order thinking skills. Nowhere is this more demonstrably false than in their treatment of formulas. An old-style text would have the student memorize a few formulas and be able to derive the rest. Common Core loads the student down with more formulas than can possibly be memorized. There is no instruction on derivation; the formulas are handed down as though an archangel brought them down from heaven. Since it is impossible to memorize all the various formulas, students are permitted – nay, encouraged – to develop cheat sheets to use on the tests. The second-biggest problem with Common Core is the problem of Big Mistakes. Pretend for a moment that a homeschool family did something as asinine as giving their eight-year-old a calculator instead of teaching him his times tables. That child would be a calculator cripple. But that would be a small mistake, affecting one child. Now consider what happens when a state made such a mistake. We dont even have to pretend. In 1986, California adopted Whole Language Arts, which proved to be a disaster. Within a decade, California plunged to 49th out of 50 in reading performance. Millions of children were affected. Big mistake. If different states have different curricula, we can observe what works and what does not, and improve thereby. But Common Core is being pushed nationwide. This could be the Biggest of all possible Mistakes. But the worst problem with Common Core is its likely effect on the educational gap between rich and poor in this country. The students I tutor have parents who would describe themselves as comfortable. No one likes to admit to being rich. But the middle class and poor cannot afford to pay a tutoring company $50 to $100 per hour so that someone will sit with their children and explain trig identities. The oft-repeated goal of Common Core is that every child will be college or career ready. Couple that slogan with the oft-expressed admiration for the European system of education – in European countries, students are slotted for university or a dead-end job at age fourteen, based ostensibly on their performance on high-stakes tests, but that performance almost inevitably matches the students socioeconomic class. Do we really want to destroy upward mobility and implement a rigid class structure in the United States of America? To recapitulate: Common Core teaches about a third of algebra 1 in pre-algebra, a third of pre-calculus in algebra 2, et cetera. Common Core teaches unnecessary abstractions as essential principles. Common Core creates calculator cripples. Common Core fails to derive mathematical expressions, instead presenting them as Holy Writ. I predict that if we continue implementing Common Core, average students will drop out of math as early as they are allowed. Even math-bright students will hate math. Tutoring companies will proliferate to serve wealthy families. The educational gap between rich and poor will widen. If we want to destroy math and science education in this country, keep Common Core. Read more: americanthinker/2014/09/uncommon_not_core.html#ixzz3Ee01tcJo Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 20:27:20 +0000
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