Latest News and Comment from Education

Friday, January 15, 2016

Are the Common Core math standards being misinterpreted? - The Washington Post

Are the Common Core math standards being misinterpreted? - The Washington Post:

Are the Common Core math standards being misinterpreted?

Kathy Liu Sun is an assistant professor of math education at Santa Clara University who was a public high school math teacher for nine years in San Jose, California. She argues in the following post that the Common Core math standards — which have caused great consternation in many places around the country — are being misinterpreted. Here’s her argument. See if you agree.

By Kathy Liu Sun
If you feel like screaming after helping your children with their math homework, you’re not alone. Across the United States there’s mounting frustration towards the Common Core State Standards for mathematics.
What many parents and teachers are experiencing is not the intent of the standards.
The key idea of Common Core is for students to come up with the solutions on their own, and not be prescriptively told how to solve the problem. The goal is for students to be able to think flexibly. Students should have the opportunity to explore, test strategies, and make sense of answers when solving problems.
In my research and work with math teachers, I’ve observed that educators are trying to fit the standards into an old system of teaching math. We used to learn math by memorizing a “rule” and then repeating it to solve a series of similar problems. Teachers would stand at the board and model how to follow this algorithm. Students would then practice the algorithm over and over.
Under the guise of Common Core, rather than learning one rule, students are now memorizing and executing three or more different rules for the same set of problems.
To better understand this, let’s look at an example of subtraction.
In the past, many of us learned subtraction by following the traditional Are the Common Core math standards being misinterpreted? - The Washington Post: