Lent Post: Common Core

Salvete.

I'm back, after a spontaneous one week of vacation. Miss me?

Today I'm going to talk about Common Core. Personally, I don't know too much about it, but from what I know, this transformation of American education is unnecessary. I would encourage and promote the condensation of education in youth (teach them calculus by the end of middle school or at least high school) because that would give our youth the educational kick that would perhaps eliminate the need for higher education. A complete rearranging of the curriculum, however, is unnecessary. No one was calling for a change in curriculum schedule because it worked well; it was not the problem. The new rearrangement doesn't seem appropriate, and the curriculum seems quite dumbed down. I wish, if anything, that they took the curriculum and shifted everything down two or three grades, especially considering that the first through fourth grades seem exactly the same.

There are no new connections between different mathematical concepts, and they in fact seem to dumb down each and every grade from the old educational plan. For example, serious two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphing does not come up until high school, perhaps freshman or sophomore year. I love that Common Core is trying to make a connection between the first, second, and third dimensions, but that should be a late-elementary concept at most.

The inspiration of this blog was http://www.video.theblaze.com/media/video.jsp?content_id=31661801. I get the confusion of the people involved, but I understand what the Common Core exam was trying to do. They were trying to split the subtraction number (316) into hundreds, tens, and ones units and subtracting each of them from the subtracted number (427) to achieve the difference. This, however, can only work to solidify subtraction, addition, and, if applied well enough, factoring. You cannot link this method to multiplication, and in fact it seems to weaken the relationship between addition and multiplication and (eventually) multiplication and exponentials/factorials. Addition should be a quick, easy process, and most students should understand the concepts behind basic addition and basic subtraction. Great. Move on to more applicable functions.

That is part of my Common Core opinion. You shall have more posts as Lent progresses.