Mother Tackles Common Core - Galt's Gulch

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Mother Tackles Common Core

Posted by awebb 12 years ago to Education

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Posted by LetsShrug 12 years ago

We need more of these.. .MANY MANY MANY more.

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Posted by CircuitGuy 12 years ago

It amazes me that this is subject for political debate. If the gov't weren't providing education, people would just choose the program they like the best.

This may unfortunately happen with healthcare. We may see regular debates about which tests should be provided by the gov't. If the tests can result in medication, the pharmaceutical industry will weigh in.

I bring this up because we recently had some problems with our kids' pre-school, and we just moved them to another pre-school. Next year our 5 y/o will be ready for 1st grade. We're going to use a public school b/c it's right by our house, but we're ready to move him on short notice if there's a problem. I'm not going to lobby politicians. He just won't be going there anymore.

Based on very little info, this Common Core outrage seems like nonsense, but I may change my tune as my kids get farther along.

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Posted by Maphesdus 12 years ago

Having read "A Mathematician's Lament," by Paul Lockhart, I think I can understand where the educators who conceived of this particular math problem might be coming from. (That is of course assuming they're operating from the same premise as Lockhart, which they may not be).

I agree that this is really not a very good way to teach math, but saying that it takes 108 steps is slightly misleading, because the entire process can actually be summed up in only two steps:

Step 1: Draw 18 circles.
Step 2: Draw 90 lines inside the circles, distributed equally among them.

So yes, while that whole process will almost certainly take much longer than simply dividing 90 by 18, lets not arbitrarily exaggerate the number of steps involved.

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