Reply to "Teacher of the Year" quits over Common Core tests

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

I don't know what kinds of kids you are seeing, but my kids can do mental math without a calculator.  They are 6 and 9.  My 6 yr old uses the base 10 method of adding/subtracting to do mental math.   This was taught in school, and reinforced at home, and this is how I do mental math, too.

I think only memorizing formulas is a terrible way of teaching.  I can do integrals still, but I can't tell you why it's done the way it is because the teachers never emphasized the "whys" only the "hows".  That really doesn't help a person understand math and how to apply it to real world concepts.

A math teacher laments the rote memorization techniques.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/02/12/why-falling-behind-math/WQ34ITFotp30EPF9knjqnJ/story.html[/quote]

For practical purposes, there's a difference between drilling through the whole deep dive into why versus just trying to quickly figure out a problem.  Not all of us are Isaac Newton, who had to invent Calculus, and neither should we have to, when we just have a basic problem to solve.  "SOH CAH TOA" - fastest way to solve a triangle, ever.  Yes, certainly an explanation of how the relationships of angles and sides in a triangle work is important to teach, but once you are beyond that, memorization is hugely more pragmatic.  There's a balance to be had, but not memorizing anything at all and instead relying on people to derive everything from scratch is certainly not pragmatic - but just the same, I don't think there's any reasonable expectation for people to memorize absolutely EVERYTHING and nobody here has proposed that.[/quote]

And there's nothing in CC standards that state that kids cannot memorize math facts.  They are just placing an emphasis early on to understand the concepts and have better numeracy skills.  Nothing wrong with that.  Like I said, in 3rd grade, DC's teacher had DC memorize the multiplication table last year.  Also, in 1st grade, my other DC learned a little rhyme from the teacher to memorize additions up to 10.  But, DC also knows how to add quickly using base 10 method.  Again, all learned under 2.0, or CC based math.[/quote]

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