I do not think the goals of Common Core math are stupid; in fact, I think they are the only thing that will prevent our students from falling even farther behind countries like Belgium and Taiwan. I hear a lot of complaints from people who point out that we learned math just fine back in the day; I also hear a lot of adults say that they are "terrible at math", that they don't understand how to calculate interest or how to determine if all those "deals" at the grocery store are actually deals. Even if you don't care about international tests or American students falling behind, do you care about your kids' ability to manage money in the future?
The idea behind Common Core is that all kids (not just kids in private schools, or kids who are naturally good at math or whatever) should understand numbers deeply. For example, as a child I easily memorized the formula for subtraction with regrouping - or borrowing, as we called it then. But I didn't understand the thinking behind the formula. So when the numbers got bigger and I had to decide whether I actually needed to regroup, I had no idea what to do.
Which is when I stopped following the formula and started figuring out things in my head. It worked for me, but not every kid is as pigheaded and determined to be right as I was (am). When I was teaching, I taught pretty much the way I had been taught, except that I tried to use manipulatives to show kids the formulas before I expected them to do it on paper.
And then my district adopted the Investigations Curriculum (since co-opted by Pearson, but still the best math curriculum I've used) and my principal became a little obsessed with Singapore Math. Suddenly (or not so suddenly, it took me a good year to really figure out how to teach math in a radically different way) we were having long discussions in math class. Suddenly my students made connections between math concepts the way they made connections between reading concepts. Suddenly they were breaking numbers down and putting them back together. Suddenly a student - a completely average student with little support at home - took a shape game we were playing, realized it was just like skip counting and then made the leap to multiplication. In first grade. Suddenly teaching subtraction with regrouping was a discussion of methodologies, with some kids using the formula I had learned and other kids breaking the numbers up a different way. It was amazing.
It was based on this experience that I was initially excited about Common Core and even the PARCC. But then my own kids started at their (highly rated) public school. And I found out that those ideals of deep discussions and making connections had turned into worksheets where kids were forced to solve problems in several different ways - none of which were discussed. Until third grade, when then my kids had to explain their thinking so they'd pass the state tests.
But still no discussions. Just worksheets that forced them to estimate when they could do the problem in their heads, or to use extra steps when solving addition problems. Worksheets where they had to write out how they solved the problem even though they'd never so much as explained their thinking verbally before. The school districts - and the education publishing companies who supply them - don't want deep discussions that require extra training for teachers. They want to give a different set of worksheets; they don't want to change the way they teach. And they certainly don't want to educate parents on why learning different methodologies is important ( better mental math, deeper understanding of how numbers and operations work together) or how to help their children effectively.
"They don’t allow time for a child to master a skill before moving onto something else. The topics change so rapidly that kids never get a chance to feel successful in mathematics."
I found this quote on one of the many, many, many sites dedicated to complaining about Common Core and various currently used math curricula. At first I was ready to dismiss it, as the author thinks that the Investigations curriculum jumps from topic to topic when in fact it's one of the ones that doesn't, but then I thought about my own kids' more traditional math curriculum. And this is one of my many complaints about it. In fact, it's one of my many complaints about the way we teach math in the United States. (Here is the BEST article about this, ever.) No really, go read the article. I'll wait.
What I wish I could say to all of the people fighting so passionately against the Common Core and the "reformed" math curricula, most of whom just want the best for their kids and kids in general, is to please stop. It's like spraying Chloraseptic on a strep throat; you're fighting the symptoms, not the problem. Get the antibiotics - fight the fact that districts aren't fundamentally changing how they teach math. Fight the fact that many teacher programs require only one or two math classes for elementary teachers. Fight the fact that textbook companies dictate much of what our kids learn. Fight the fact that few educational administrators could teach a bunch of kindergartners how to add or a bunch of fifth graders how to multiply fractions. Fight the fact that even homeschool curricula don't encourage deep discussions about math concepts. Fight the fact that many people think a focus on deep understanding means that our kids don't need to memorize their multiplication facts.
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