Reply to 2.0 1st grade curriculum: Carbon Dioxide? Yes! Telling time? No!

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[quote=Anonymous]^but there are many more adult Americans who are not very good at math than those who are.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html?_r=0

"A 2012 study comparing 16-to-65-year-olds in 20 countries found that Americans rank in the bottom five in numeracy. On a scale of 1 to 5, 29 percent of them scored at Level 1 or below, meaning they could do basic arithmetic but not computations requiring two or more steps"

[list]And even if they try to implement a better way of teaching math, you get this:[/list]
"Teachers primarily learn to teach by recalling their memories of having been taught, about 13,000 hours of instruction during a typical childhood — a problem since their instruction wasn’t very good."

"Official math-reform training did not help, either. Sometimes trainers offered patently bad information — [u]failing to clarify, for example, that even though teachers were to elicit wrong answers from students, they still needed, eventually, to get to correct ones. [/u]Textbooks, too, barely changed, despite publishers’ claims to the contrary."

[list]And no training[/list]
"With the Common Core, teachers are once more being asked to unlearn an old approach and learn an entirely new one, essentially on their own. Training is still weak and infrequent, and principals — who are no more skilled at math than their teachers — remain unprepared to offer support. Textbooks, once again, have received only surface adjustments, despite the shiny Common Core labels that decorate their covers. “To have a vendor say their product is Common Core is close to meaningless,” says Phil Daro, an author of the math standards."

[list]Here's the result[/list]
"But if a teacher doesn’t use the dots to illustrate bigger ideas, they become just another meaningless exercise. Instead of memorizing familiar steps, students now practice even stranger rituals, like drawing dots only to count them or breaking simple addition problems into complicated forms (62+26, for example, must become 60+2+20+6) without understanding why. This can make for even poorer math students."
[u]
All this sound familiar?[/u][/quote]

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