The "NEW" way to do math "via Common Core" should make you mad!!!

Are you upset with this “new way” they are doing math now days in school?  If so, you really should be upset about the way you were taught math when you were in school!!!  I sure am, and the teachers and college students I work with are as well.  Every time I do a training, it never fails…someone comes up to me and says “Why wasn’t I taught this when I was in school?”  What makes everyone upset about this “new math” is because we were never taught to THINK about math, we were just taught to DO math.  I was an excellent “doer” of mathematics, but when I became a teacher I realized I did not understand math.  Give me any computation to perform and I could get you the answer…ummmm….but wait…I needed paper and a pencil so that I could write the problem down and perform the algorithm.  Ask me to quickly figure out the change I was going to get back when I handed the cashier $20 for the $17.68 bill, and I couldn’t do it….well, I could but I did the algorithm in my head.  Or how about the 15% tip to give the server at the restaurant, I could not do that in my head.  That’s what I thought doing math in your head meant…you line up the numbers and perform the algorithm.  However, that IS NOT what those people we see as “mathy” do.  They have number sense that I never had until I was in my late 20s.  They use what they know about numbers to help them make math problems easier…and that is what Common Core Math is about!

Watch this to see why I am mad about Common Core Math

It IS NOT about tricking kids into doing harder, more complicated work to get to an answer.  It’s about helping kids develop an understanding of mathematical concepts so that they can be flexible enough with numbers to determine for themselves what makes sense on any given math problem.  Real mathematicians (who do math for a living) do that all the time!  They do not solve 1,000-348 the same way that they would solve 1,000-898.  The way that we solve problems depends upon two things; the NUMBERS in the problem and the CONTEXT of the problem…well, given that we have number sense in order to think outside the traditional algorithm box.

One of the challenges the teachers I work with have is helping parents understand why they are not teaching the “old way” to do math computation (i.e. the traditional algorithms).  Parents get frustrated when they can’t help their 2nd grader with their homework…I get it, I would have been one of those parents 8 years ago before I went through RTA (Recovering Traditionalists Anonymous) and learned there was a better way to do math and that was to THINK before you just COMPUTE.  Teachers are not trying to teach children five different and more complicated ways to solve an addition problem just because Common Core says to (which it really doesn’t if you go read them), teachers are trying to get children to be thinkers.  They want children who can look at the problem 2014-1999 and not have to set it up into an algorithm.  Or better yet, they want children who don’t freak out when that same problem is put into a story problem like Griffen was born in 1999.  It is the year 2014, how old is Griffen?  Or let’s throw a challenge problem at our kids and make them figure out if he is 15 or 14…Griffen was born in August of 1999.  It is March of 2014, how old is Griffen?  You can’t just pull the numbers out and compute that one!

Encourage children to be thinkers, not just “doers” of mathematics.  And stop spreading the hate about how teachers are teaching math now and instead go in and talk to the teacher, you’ll find out that they are trying to develop children’s number sense and thinking skills before the kids just blindly follow an algorithm so that they don’t end up solving problems like this (and yes, I saw a high school student do this…that kid knew the procedure but doesn’t UNDERSTAND it):

Yes, Common Core is not perfect (and all I know about is the math side so that is all I can speak about), but the idea behind the math standards is to move in the direction of getting kids to THINK and EXPLAIN instead of just DO.  I am mad about this because I was never given that opportunity.  I was a good little rule follower and I could follow the rules of math perfectly…but I could not THINK about mathematics, especially when it was a real math problem I encountered in my life not just out of a textbook.  It wasn’t until I went back and got my Master’s degree (or what I call going through Recovering Traditionalists Anonymous) that I learned you can THINK about math instead of just DO math.