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Friday, February 19, 2016

Why Common Core math is not as easy as riding a bike – Missouri Education Watchdog

Why Common Core math is not as easy as riding a bike – Missouri Education Watchdog:

Why Common Core math is not as easy as riding a bike



 It is quite possible that if the CCSSI had only focused on reading and writing first, the public might not have noticed or cared much about the standards. The lack of good grammatical skills might easily be blamed on modern social media’s casual acceptance of poor grammar or space limitations rather than the fact that it was no longer specifically taught. When an adult used a common quote from classic literature that sailed over a child’s head, it might have been written off by thinking they are reading new classics instead of realizing they were spending way more time reading instructional text. It takes a while for people to realize how much their cultural identity is developed through shared experience and shared reading. But unfortunately for the developers of CCSS, they also introduced new math standards that were very instructional in nature which changed the way teachers taught math in the very early grades. Here they ran up against the phenomenon of neuroplasticity and garnered the attention and ire of adults.

There is a great video that provides a very clear demonstration of this idea of neuroplasticity. It gives a real world demonstration of how it works that should resonate with parents looking at Common Core math.
A quick synopsis is this: When we learn to ride a bike we take on a novel experience and begin to build neural pathways that help us remember how to do the task the next time. The more we practice the activity, the stronger those pathways become. When we try to do the same task using a different technique, our brain is strongly drawn to using those established pathways even though we can clearly see that the old Why Common Core math is not as easy as riding a bike – Missouri Education Watchdog: