Math topics that need to be put out of their misery. Part 1: Writing algebraic expressions
Last month I wrote a post called ‘The Death of math’ which got a lot of attention as I described how I’d improve math teaching in this country by significantly reducing the number of topics taught and by making math optional after 8th grade. A line that got quoted a lot when people tweeted about this post was “If I were made ‘Math Czar’ I would gleefully chop at least forty percent of the topics that are currently taught from K to 12.”
The fact is that the original intent of the common core, was to address this very concern. The problem, though, is that they didn’t actually cut anything, as far as I can tell. Why this happened is tough to say. One complaint that teachers have about the common core is that they were developed by a very small group of people without input from teachers. Perhaps that small group didn’t have the heart to cut any topics.Or maybe the committee, even if it was small, was unable to come to agreement on which topics should be cut. You see, the issue isn’t so much the size of the group or whether or not they got input from teachers, the issue is that the ability of that group wasn’t up to the task. Perhaps it would have been better if the task were left up to one very clever individual who understood the
