Comment by unpythonic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unpythonic | Hacker News Reader

As much as the Common Core standards are criticized here in California, I have to say that the emphasis on the "why" behind every operation is really fantastic. It's usually in the last section of each homework, but it provides a good discussion point when going over the homework each night.

Asking students to answer questions like the following are easy to zip through, but they provide a good place to pause and find a way to connect the physical mechanics of a solution to the reasoning behind it: "How would you explain to someone else why the fraction 1/2 greater than 1/4?" or "Why doesn't angle-angle-angle show congruence but angle-side-angle does?"

I've also noticed that the Common Core brings in advanced topics earlier without announcing to the student that it is an advanced topic. Ideas from algebra are brought in at natural points of the discussion rather than making a big deal of it. By the time that they realize they're learning algebra, they are already into many of the "rules" that would have otherwise been taught by rote. If you understand why you have to multiply both sides 5 to find out x/5 = 30, it feels much less arbitrary when the rules are made more explicit later.

I haven't worked in an american classroom, but as a math educator, thought the CommonCore looked great when it was first rolling out.

Math education is (kind of strangely) a bit of a battlefield in the US (maybe not so strangely, when everything else seems to be, too)... I think a big part of it is prevalent math anxiety - perhaps embarrassment at seeing unfamiliar things on the kid's homework. Along with this, there's still lingering bad PR from the 'New Math' of the seventies, which made it somehow acceptable to make the argument that we should stick to teaching math the same way forever. (Especially for people who believe that math hasn't changed since Newton.)

Agreed, I can't stand the way we teach math in the US. I love math enough to have accidentally gotten a minor in it, but especially high school does nothing but train kids to hate math. My calculus class in high school was a net negative, since teaching to the test just caused many of my friends to switch away from STEM majors in college (if Calc 1 was that horrible, why become an engineer ahd have to suffer even more?).

One of these friends went on to become a forensic accountant, so she obviously couldn't hate math that much, but that calculus class was traumatic enough that she summarily dismissed a biology major in college. I think one of the main pain points, which my dad was able to tutor me through, was understanding why. Learning calculus (or any math, for that matter) as just a list of mechanical steps is awful, whereas learning why we perform the mechanical steps allows one to glimpse the beauty behind math. I wonder how many children we've ruined this beautiful subject for?

I doubt the critics of CC know what "New Math" was.

There's so much misinformation on the Common Core that many people don't realize how much of a modest adjustment it was from before. Another way of summarizing the changes made by the Common Core, aside from your note that it focuses more on why, is that it advances the math curriculum by about half a year.

There is indeed so much misinformation! People should read the standards themselves, and also differentiate between the Common Core standards and the curricula being sold to districts.

Reading through the actual Common Core standard was what convinced me that it was a step in the right direction. It's clear that a lot of careful thought went into the Common Core math standards.

If you've got a child, I'd highly recommend reading through the standards in both math and ELA. They're well done, particularly the math.

One can make a good argument that the "why" of math is really the only reason to teach it as a standard subject required for everyone, at least beyond just elementary arithmetic.

We like to pretend that all kinds of jobs require knowing algebra and geometry, but no, but that is greatly exaggerated.

What you learn when you study those subjects that you have a decent chance of actually using on the job is how to reason.

There were a couple of interesting essays on this point by Underwood Dudley.

One is called "What is Mathematics For?" (which he admits is click-bait, and it should really be called "What is Mathematics Education For") from the May 2010 "Notices of the AMS" [1].

The other is called "Is Mathematics Necessary?" [2], which I believe is an earlier, shorter version of the what later became the AMS article.

[1] https://www.ams.org/notices/201005/rtx100500608p.pdf

[2] http://www.public.iastate.edu/~aleand/dudley.html

> As much as the Common Core standards are criticized here in California, I have to say that the emphasis on the "why" behind every operation is really fantastic.

The one reason why I dislike Common Core is that this kind of explanation get quickly become tedious if you already understand what’s going on and it’s “obvious” to you. And many teachers seem to like to use this section as an excuse to waste their students’ time at home by forcing to write much more than they really need to.

> The one reason why I dislike Common Core is that this kind of explanation get quickly become tedious if you already understand what’s going on and it’s “obvious” to you.

If that's the case, then it sounds like your child needs to be in a higher level math course. If they're already at the top, then I don't think having to explain in detail the "why" behind concepts will be a net negative for your child.

Learning how to explain a concept simply and succinctly is critical to most modern knowledge-based jobs.

Just curious, have you read all the way through the Common Core math standards? Most of the people I know in technical and engineering professions who have read completely through it (and not just a single section or grade level), come out with a lot of respect for the standards.

I don't actually have a child: I was merely basing this observation off watching my sister go through Common Core and compare to my (pre-Common Core) experience.

> If that's the case, then it sounds like your child needs to be in a higher level math course.

This isn't necessarily possible at school, and besides, even if it was, this may not be the best idea (for developmental, social, etc. reasons). Outside of school, sure–she is doing things to get ahead and learn more.

> If they're already at the top, then I don't think having to explain in detail the "why" behind concepts will be a net negative for your child.

This is exactly the group I think it's a net negative for: you're forcing them to put what they feel is "obvious" into words. This is fine once or twice, or when teaching others, but on assignments you have to do it repeatedly, and at some point you'll just give up and start writing things that are just different ways to word "because that's the next thing we have to do" to fill space.

> Just curious, have you read all the way through the Common Core math standards? Most of the people I know in technical and engineering professions who have read completely through it (and not just a single section or grade level), come out with a lot of respect for the standards.

No, I haven't, but I'm sure they're not bad. It's just that the way they ended up being implemented hasn't really impressed me, since it seems like the goals they've laid out aren't being achieved.

I don't know whether or not Common Core is the "right" solution for math education, but on face value it is.

A good math student understands the subject in a principled way, which shapes inference and intuition for future discovery, and results in rock solid grasp of the subject.

Supposedly, this is the point of the Common Core math curriculum, right?

I've noticed this too. Also teaching different ways of solving the same problem - I had to make sure kids didn't go back to solving the way they knew how already.

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