Let’s Talk about Common Core Math

I recently told my daughter Sally that if we didn’t arrive at an event we were going to in time for a specific activity, we’d have to wait for two hours before it was scheduled again. She decided to figure out how many minutes that would be, and quickly realized that she needed to add 60 and 60. Now Sally is only six, and we were in the car without access to pencil and paper, but you know what? She worked out a shortcut and was able to find the answer. She took the zeros off and added 6 and 6—a task well suited to a first grader—and then put the zero back on to arrive at 120.

At its simplest, this is exactly what Common Core math is designed to teach children how to do. It’s about teaching children concepts rather than formulas, and intuitive relationships between numbers rather than reliance on paper and pencil. And yet, parental tirades against Common Core math have become something of a staple in our society today. This is unfortunate, because if we want our children to truly understand math we should support the Common Core.

Over the past two years, Hemant Mehta of the Friendly Atheist has written four blog posts responding to parental complaints and explaining just what Common Core math is and does. Hemant has years of experience teaching math to high school students, and I have found his posts wonderfully explanatory and truly helpful. I’m going to link these for posts below. Next time you see someone complaining about Common Core math, I’d recommend sending them a link to one of these articles.

About That ‘Common Core’ Math Problem Making the Rounds on Facebook…

The problem with [the traditional subtraction] method is that if I ask students to explain why it works, they’d have a really hard time explaining it to me. They might be able to do the computation, but they don’t get the math behind it. For some people, that’s fine. For math teachers, that’s a problem because it means a lot of students won’t be able to grasp other math concepts in the future because they never really developed “number sense.”

This is How You Do “Common Core” Subtraction

I’ll add (ha!) that in my years of teaching math, I ran into many, many students who could do the basic skills on paper. But when I needed them to think more abstractly, they got completely lost. The students who could tackle basic problems in different ways had a much easier time learning algebra than those who couldn’t. And on a broader level, students should learn several ways to tackle what looks to be a simple problem, because the math you learn in school isn’t just about finding the right answer; it’s about teaching you how to think.

It’s Worth Taking a Full Minute to Learn How to Add 9 and 6: A Response to the “Common Core” Critics

They have no idea that the standards suggest students learn a variety of ways to perform basic math skills, not just this one particular method. They don’t understand how students who are taught to “just add” or “memorize the answer” struggle with math later in life because they don’t know how to manipulate numbers like the teacher in the video is doing.

The Dad Who Wrote a Check Using “Common Core” Math Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About

Have you ever seen the show Chopped on Food Network? The competing chefs are handed a basket of random ingredients every round and told to make an appetizer, entrée, and dessert. There are no recipes. There are no step-by-step instructions. They just have to make it happen using whatever cooking knowledge is in their heads.

The best contestants are the ones who see those ingredients and know instinctivelyhow to use them and combine them.

That’s what great math students learn how to do, too. They see a problem and they just know how to manipulate the information at their disposal. They knew how to step away from the algorithms. They didn’t need a “recipe” because they understood how to mess around with the numbers to get the answer they wanted.

For a lot of people traditional is inherently good and new is inherently frightening. We parents know the old way of teaching math, and as such it is somewhat familiar. For many parents, difference is scary. But difference and change aren’t necessarily bad. Sometimes they’re very very good. I for one am excited that my children may learn to understand math better I did.

I’ll leave you with this video for those interested in learning more: