Hacker News Reader

Comment by jndsn402 | Hacker News Reader

IMO, the problem with the way Common Core has been implemented is that there is a whole new analytical/critical thinking component that is bundled together with math. But parents when parents think of math they think of computation, arithmetic, formulas etc. Not 'explain why ancient calendars used 60-day units' (actual question from my daughter's 6th grade curriculum, may be misquoting a bit. The answer is because 60 has many factors).

I'm not saying it's good or bad to teach math that way, it was just not communicated well and still isn't. Math has been replaced with math+critical thinking. It's as if English class now also included Latin. Maybe good, maybe bad, but it's a whole different class.

View on HN

It's hard for me to imagine a world view where adding critical thinking to a subject might make it worse.

> It's as if English class now also included Latin.

I think a better analogy would be "it's as if English class now included critical thinking." Or "it's as if Science class now included critical thinking." Or "it's as if History class now included critical thinking."

All of those sound unambiguously good to me.

The math curriculum I was exposed to in school (relatively recently, by any standard) always included critical thinking and was likely the subject that involved the most critical thinking because it was the subject where critical thinking was the most objective.

It seems odd to teach critical thinking with a stack of pre-printed worksheets that are the same for every student.

The infrastructure is not in place to teach those concepts successfully. The question "explain why ancient calendars used 60-day units" is no more elucidative than "explain why a week has 7 days" or "explain why the French Republican Calendar and the International Fixed Calendar failed to survive" or "meditate for 2 hours on the number 60".

I am saying unequivocally that it is bad to teach math that way. A kid does not have enough pre-existing knowledge of any ancient calendars for that association to help rather than confuse. If you're going to do that sort of thing, you have to tie into something that all kids at that age already know about. So really, you can only count on the stuff they have already been taught in school.

I don't recall, exactly, when I was taught about ancient calendars in school. Oh, wait, yes I do--it was never. I do recall someone asking once why a circle had 360 degrees in it, and the answer was, "It's essentially an arbitrary convention; we'll always be using radians in this class anyway."

While the high-level goals of the curriculum may be pedagogically sound, by the time that the course materials make it down to the classroom level, the original intent has been thoroughly diluted by the people trying to implement them.

As someone who teaches at the college level, I hope it works! Many American student come in not only unfluent with basic mechanical moves like adding fractions and dealing with exponents, but with little "number sense." Finding that you need to go -0.55 miles an hour to go from Cleveland to St. Loius (about 550 miles) in ten hours just does not faze some of them at all.

In college I'm always asking students to analyze the results to applied calculus questions and it can be a struggle and a revelation. You mean these numbers have meaning?!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com