Reply to Why are people so upset about Common Core?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Have you ever tried teaching "missing addend" to first graders?  It might work for the sophisticated ones, but it doesn't for a lot of them. [b] It frustrates them.[/b]  Sure, you teach it--but it is not a value we should be testing.[/quote]

Yes, I have taught it to my ESOL students.   Very easy.[/quote]

Let's be clear here -- your gripe is, you think you can NOT teach "unsophisticated" 1st graders how to solve missing addend problems??

[/quote]

Please answer my question.

Are you saying that you believe some 1st graders are simply too slow, unintelligent, unsophisticated, to be able to answer the question 7 + _____   = 10?[/quote]

Because you fear "frustrating" the poor, underprivileged children?  That really bothers me.   Personally, I expect that all my students, even the slow ones, will master the grade level math objectives.   And so if something is hard for them to learn, I keep looking until I find a way to help them get the concept.  And yes, absolutely, there is an easy way to teach missing addends.

So you know what DOESN'T work, though?  If the only way you teach these poor, underprivileged children to add and subtract is through mastering a simple algorithm, because you believe that's all they can handle.   If you only teach children to add by counting on, then they just know that 7 and 3 is 10 because 7... 8  ... 9... 10.

If you spend a lot of time, though, helping them learn their number bonds BY HEART, they know that 7 and 3 make ten, and 6 and 4 make ten, and 5 and 5 make ten... WITHOUT COUNTING.   And then when it comes time to subtract, they don't need to say 10 and then count down.... or say 8 and count up 2... they just know, because of "properties of operations" that if 8 and 2 make 10, then for the equation:   10 - ____ = 2 ... the missing addend [b]has[/b] to be 8.

If you spend a lot of time working with these skills at the start, to build up basic numeracy, it is not difficult at all to teach these concepts you seem to think are so complicated.

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