I'm glad my youngest is a freshman. This new common core does not sound like teaching as much as indoctrination. There is a huge backlash and some systems have rejected it. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
I always wonder why we could send a guy to the moon with a slide rule in the 60s and can't do shoot with supercomputers in the now.
Old math seemed to work just fine!
We are mired in the middle of it with our oldest in the third grade. So far the problem hasn't been with what they are teaching (though IMO they are trying to get them to learn mathematical shortcuts before they have good grasp on the basics which is just causing the kids confusion) but with the execution.
All the tests are on computer. Some of her grades were off from normal (she's been an A student so far, and an A+ in reading, her first three reading comprehension tests got her scores in the 60's and 70's). We contacted the teacher asking what we could do to help, maybe if we saw her tests and what she was struggling with we could help her out at home. We were told there was a website that we could go to to view her tests. We went and it looked like this...
1. A Correct
2. C Incorrect
3. A Correct
No questions, no idea of what the answers were that went along with the multiple choice answers. Took us 3 weeks of being "those parents" and getting a group of parents together in the principal's office in order to get copies of the tests so that we could see where the problems were.
And it wasn't the teacher's or even the school's fault. There was no easy mechanism on the computer system for parents to be able to see the tests and answers. It appeared to me to be set up that way on purpose.
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