Reply to No doing well with Common Core, but we'll with Singapore math

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[quote=Anonymous]I think of it as if you were "teaching" a child how to build with blocks. Most of us were taught math as if there was only one correct way to combine the blocks to build a house. We could repeat the procedure to build the structure, some of us faster than others, but we couldn't discuss it, and we couldn't explain why it worked, and we certainly couldn't come up with another way to build it, especially once we moved beyond basic math and simple algorithms.

Kids today are being taught the language of building and that there there are many ways to combine the blocks to build many different structures, and that there are pros and cons to each combination which they can discuss and then make choices based on the situation they are in. Included in that is the memorization of math facts and key algorithms the way we learned it (or tried and true building patterns, to continue the analogy). But our kids are going to understand those algorithms and why the work so well much better than we did.

Because we are starting this mental flexibility early, with problems that are otherwise "easy" to memorize, parents are freaking out because they want to see their kids just get the "right answer" as quickly as possible. Which misses the point of learning math entirely.

Just my view of it.[/quote]

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