Reply to Common Core's epic fail: Special Education

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I think that showing kids multiple modalities before understanding the concept absolutely can kill creativity.  Here is an example from my son.  He was asked to add 36 and 24.  He immediately said 60.  He was taught that you can add the tens and then the ones and then add them together.  He was told you could count forward.  He was taught some estimation tricks.  All are totally fine but he got stuck trying to explain how he came to his answer.  Turns out that he groups in his head by 6 (this month).  He was actually recognizing that 24 and 36 are groupings of 6 and using that insight to come up with 60.  He doesn't have the language to explain multiplication (he doesn't know what it is).  He does know his 6 times table because he heard his sister memorizing it.  It took me a very long time to figure out what he was doing and an even longer time to convince him that it was totally fine to do it that way even though it wasn't one of the options.  Kids have to be free to make their own connections and to not try to do them until they are ready.  Teach the concept. Being teach multiple ways of getting there until the concept is super solid.  And when they are ready, they will be able to brainstorm these methods in their own.[/quote]

I would argue that making groups of 6 as your son did, while extremely creative, is not a very efficient strategy to use.   It will only work in those infrequent cases where both addends happen to be multiples of 6 (or multiples of the same number, if you want to extend the concept). It also relies on knowing the times tables perfectly, and being able to keep in your head how many groups of six for both addends, then add them together, then multiply by 6 to get your answer.

Our number system is based on, well, base ten -- multiples of 10.   So it makes a lot of sense and is most efficient, to have students learn very well how to add groups of 10, and to quickly make additional groups of ten from the numbers in the ones column, and add that new group of ten to the rest of the groups of ten.   This is a method that will work for all numbers, and only requires students to be able to multiply by 10 (which is super easy of course) and to be know what two numbers add together to make ten (number bonds of ten).

[b]I'd rather not have kids be encouraged to brainstorm new methods or learn multiple ways of adding.   Stick with one efficient system[/b].   Once they have totally mastered that, if they want to experiment with "Hey, are both those numbers multiples of 6?  Multiples of 8?" that's really cool.[/quote]

NP.  That's not at all how Common Core math works.  The concept is to learn many different ways of adding before a student selects a preferred way of doing it.  And then they need to explain all of it, while they're being exposed to all sorts of different ways of adding.

That's pretty much exactly what the prior several posts are saying.  That it seems students should learn one way to add first before learning six other ways.  Contrary to the way Common Core teaches math.[/quote]

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