Common Core Sheets

Regarding math is racist, I read your linked article and it had a link[1] to an article discussing the mindset behind the classes ran by Shraddha Shirude. She talks about the way math class is taught normally:

>They come into math class with a learned helplessness because of the way that math has been structured: teach how to do things, then hand them the thing, and they practice. It’s the I do, we do, you do — [a] very common strategy used in mathematics education, and it’s still taught today. Their point is I show them, I model it, I show them what being a good mathematician looks like, we do it all together, and then they try it on their own. And this linear thought doesn’t allow for creativity, but mathematics is an inherently creative content area.

I can confirm I'm not a math person by standardized tests. I literally randomly guessed on the Math portion of the only ACT because that was better than me trying.

If we inherited the normal math teaching method from European origins, it definitely failed me. I'm fascinated by math in many ways, but only because I sometimes glimpse its beauty - like watching a XYZ axis CNC drilling machine doing its thing, seeing XYZ coordinates going by on the program screen, and suddenly realizing what trigonometry is for, and what it's describing.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's racist by definition anymore than Astronomy is because we accept what an Italian said he observed in the sky. I suppose the "racist" portion would be assuming it's the only correct way, or the superior way to teach.

1. https://southseattleemerald.com/2020/07/21/ethnic-studies-ed...

The hatred is mostly from it forcing specific strategies for simple tasks. The intent is to help students gain better intuition for math and gain multiple problem solving tools. But you end up with children who didn't understand the lesson taking homework to their parents who know a "simpler" way not understanding what's being asked for and everyone getting frustrated. I fully understand, in school my issue was always getting marked down for not being able to show my work for mental math.

A lot of the bad examples of it you'll see are just poor teaching (e.g. the "3 x 5 can't be 5 + 5 + 5, it's 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3" image), and we had that before Common Core. That guy's "batshit insane" example is just a slightly obtuse word problem.

Yes, that is why Principia Mathematica [0] is taught in 1st grade. If you can't prove 1 + 1 = 2, then how can you progress? (joking, of course)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica

> McKinsey

Oh, fuck me. Fuck the McKinsey kids in particular.

> Of course you produced nothing of value. Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge.

That's certainly how it's set up today, but I find it difficult to believe that the most optimized, useful, and productive way to teach children about reality is the method we've settled on in the modern US. School could instead be designed around the production of art, goods, and services that are actually desired and used by people in and outside of the school. This would be a great deal more difficult to set up and maintain than a series of gradeable worksheets.

> Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge.

Under the current model, is the knowledge really absorbed? Math class is great example. Most people struggle through algebra and trigonometry worksheets for a few hundred hours and then immediately dump the knowledge when they graduate and can't even name the three primary triangle side-ratios five years later. Was completing curated problem sets under threat of a worse career if they failed really the best use of their time? That can't be the best way to teach them.

> I spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot from that.

Sure, but you were producing something of value. When you learned about an issue, you went hunting for the root cause because people were actually relying on you to do so, and when you fixed the issue you felt real satisfaction, and retained a desire to remember what you'd done. Also, you were paid.

I would wager a good deal of money that what you learned while managing the app stuck in your brain a lot more effectively than if the same activity had been taught to you in a class where you completed worksheets based on the inventory management platform.

Most people who go through school don't learn to become competent writers. This is shows that school does not teach people to be competent writers.

So competent writers generally did not learn that skill in school. At best they learned some foundational skills. But the competent writers that I've known, often think that there were betters ways in which they could have learned those skills.

I have sometimes been accused of writing competently. And so it should be no surprise that I agree with them. School was a terrible way for me to learn. And I credit most of my skills to things that I did outside of school.

This goes doubly for homework assignments. As https://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-myth/ explains, research shows that homework is useless overall. It can help, or it can hurt. And on average it balances out to no net benefit.

I have ADHD. This reduces the odds that homework helps and increases the odds that it hurts. Growing up, homework was a constant burden on my life. I would have been far better off if I'd been given less homework. Particularly homework which looks like a practice drill.

Absolutely. After pondering over this website myself for 20 minutes, I felt similarly to OP regarding the long slog through elementary and secondary schooling to finally feel like there was "progress". It's clear filtering by grades in the sheets, the tempo of the exercises is painfully slow. I remember as a kindergartner being able to produce and memorize multiplication tables after being taught the process. It took at least 3 to 4 more years until school ever began expect it.

The thing is many of these concepts and ideas and facts _are_ simple and straightforward. In seventh grade I literally stopped doing my work altogether, and was offered by the teaching staff to move onward to eighth grade instead. I felt then that I still understand now, that forcing yourself through the paces is important too. If I skipped a grade who knows what little things I may have missed.

It's like lifting weights, you're better off being gradual about your increases and pushing your rep counts -- instead of doing two reps of something you shouldn't even be attempting.

The truth is any good teacher and school would be able to provide projects and exercises that would help apply the types of rote work the sheets present. Even if you only ever did the sheets on the site, it'd still take some kids the whole year to get through them. If teachers are creative enough, there should be enough flexibility to cater to both student types.

Thank you for your compliment.

To clarify, I'm not saying that it's possible to learn to write without writing a great deal. I certainly wouldn't have learned to write well without writing often.

However, I didn't learn to write particularly well until I was out of college and had begun writing for myself. In school I was rarely interested in ensuring that what I was writing was interesting, well-phrased, or enjoyable to read. Those qualities simply weren't prioritized, which is weird, because those are the qualities by which writing is judged in "the real world".

I certainly relied on basic writing practice I received in completion-based classes, but my claim isn't that I didn't learn anything useful in school, it's that the time I did spend in school was poorly allocated and resulted in an underdeveloped product.

"If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn't learn to walk without going to school."

You are correct. But, as a teacher myself, it doesn't matter if you are good or bad as a teacher, you can't give every student what they need to best excel. Everything you do is a tradeoff that helps certain types of students, and others not so much. Perhaps make some disinterested in the topic.

As a teacher or institute, you decide on a teaching philosophy, which then determines your tradeoffs in practice. And you live with the result.

This is no different from, as many on this forum will understand, writing software for a certain type of user. Changing the UI or featureset will tradeoff the type of users interested in your software. You can't satisfy everyone.

Also in the US the incentives for going into teaching are totally wrong. We should train the best and brightest so that our kids learn from them, but the salaries and working conditions are so bad that it actively discourages people.

Mastery-based learning is good, but there is a degenerate path that is important to avoid. Some students can master basic computational tasks (like addition and multiplication), but don't have the maturity to reliably produce that mastery; in other words, they're sloppy. A human instructor teaching to the mastery approach will move on with them, and when they are learning a later skill and they make a basic error (7+4=12, for example), will point it out to the student, and let them fix that, and show that they have mastered the more advanced skill. A computer, on the other hand, will just decree that they got the question wrong, have not achieved mastery, and force them to repeat the instruction. It's very demotivating, and still not fully solved, although Khan Academy's recent change allowing students to reset/start-over tests without completing them has helped.

> I'll add given that you are on HN you probably also remember and understand more from school than you realize.

Maybe--my claim isn't that I didn't learn anything in school, but that what I did learn was a fraction of what I could have learned, and that most of the material I was shown I now struggle to remember. I can barely recall a thing from any science class that wasn't reinforced by my engineering degree, and most of the things I know about history I learned after college when I started actually paying attention to it. Even my current geography skills are from repetitions outside of college as an adult.

When you listen to the average American trying to put together a coherent argument about society, politics, foreign countries, history, etc., or even just to write a coherent email, you're seeing the result of years of worksheet-classes. These are people who are certain they possess a great deal of knowledge, when in fact their recall of specific facts and ability to reason logically are heavily atrophied from years of educational neglect and accidental gaslighting. "I got an A in English class and a 28 on the ACT, so I must be good at English!"

> repetition is still required to do anything other than move a vague knowledge to applicable knowledge.

I completely agree with this.

Funnily enough, one of my issues with worksheet-classes is that there's not enough repetition. Topics in classes from mathematics to English to science are treated like Pokemon moves, where once you learn the move you retain it forever.

This is in stark contrast to the teaching of artisanal skills like cooking, sports, music, and art. Even if they're learned in a class, the successful execution of the skill is required every time you interact with it, and explicit attention is paid to the necessities of repetition.

In music, if you can't play a passage, you slow down and repeat it many times, and if you still can't play it, you move backwards to fundamental skills and repeat those. In high school math, if you can't execute a problem, you get a few weeks to voluntarily try repeating it yourself, and then you're given an exam, and then the entire class moves on with or without you.