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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Well, one thing is that I can’t help my kids with their homework. I simply don’t understand the way they do the math these days. They get the same answers, but go through entirely different steps. I remember one parent teacher conference where my kid was in attendance (4th grade). The teacher was showing my kid how to do a problem. I was able to get the answer in my head, but she was using all these boxes and things to get the answer and I could not follow along. I still have no idea how she got the right answer doing that. It seemed incredibly complicated.

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The point of most of the common core math changes were to teach numeracy rather than rote arithmetic.

Remember how some teachers said "you won't just have a calculator on you at all times" and it turned out that we all carry around what would have been supercomputers for the time? Early math education realized that too, and shifted the focus to quickly estimating solutions through understanding the relationships of their numbers so you can go "hey, something's not here" when you work with your calculator, rather than just accepting whatever garbage out came from your garbage in.

It is complicated, but the point isn't to get the right answer per se, it's to give kids a geometric intuition of numerical relationships by going through the whole rigamarole.

This isn't the first time such changes have happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math, target of the famous Tom Lehrer song by the same name. The idea even seems exactly the same as common core:

>In that unfamiliar context, students couldn't just mindlessly follow an algorithm, but had to think why the place value of the "hundreds" digit in base seven is 49. Keeping track of non-decimal notation also explains the need to distinguish numbers (values) from the numerals that represent them

I do not have a child or direct experience with common core.

Personally I suspect issues lie more in teachers themselves not being taught correctly than the actual concept behind common core though.

From what i can gather it is trying to introduce the concept of factoring earlier which in my opinion makes sense since that is really useful in Algebra and above.

Learning to teach is very different than learning, let alone first principles learning for children.

Having basic understanding, then skills, then competency to remember and test via assessment in that order can be missing even for graduates.

Universities focus on teaching young adults how to teach children.

The rest of the world as adults don’t learn how children do.

And many teachers have continual education.

That means the implementation of common core is also upon teachers with decade(s) of experience being told to teach differently.

Regardless, if your child has a nack for maths that is a great advantage over the other children and worth investing in since so few people bother to learn it at all.

Additionally it leads to better reasoning and logic in other academic and professional settings as well. Which means a better chance at a higher income and ability to sustain and secure their livelihood and thus afford having their own children possibly. Which means a better chance for continuation of a little bit of yourself.

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