I find it interesting how all of the people who complained about how terrible math education was when they were kids turn into grownups who wish they would just go back to the traditional way of teaching math.

My sister is an elementary school teacher, and she's posted some videos on her Facebook page explaining how common core teaches - and they look so much BETTER than the way I learned to do math.

As far as I can tell, the old system was some combination of "memorize times tables" and "structured brute force the answer." The new system tries to teach kids ways to think about numbers and simplify them so that they can use mental math.

The people who developed the standards came up with them by studying which approaches to teaching actually got kids to learn math. I don't think "we did things a certain way for hundreds of years before we started looking at it scientifically" is a strong refutation of that approach.