Hot Air:
When I went to school, I may not have been the math whiz that my son the Mathemagician turned out to be, but I didn’t really have any trouble learning subtraction by, y’know … subtracting. Apparently that’s so passé as to be called the Granny Method in a new Common Core-compliant textbook. Our colleague Erick Erickson found this instruction on subtraction in his daughter’s third-grade textbook that almost looks like intentional satire:
The picture above is from my third grade daughter’s math book. This is the only page that explains that method for subtraction. There are, for the record, four ways to subtract that my third grader must learn.
This is the only page explaining that method. This is the only example. The very next page goes to arrays. The page after that goes to multiplication. This is it.
The traditional method of subtracting, borrowing and carrying numbers, is derisively called the “Granny Method.” The new method makes no freaking sense to either my third grader or my wife.
We send our child to a Christian private school. We thought our child could escape this madness. But standardized tests, the SAT, and the ACT are all moving over to Common Core. So our child has to learn this insanity. But we cannot help her. The book offers only one example.
I’m pretty good with patterns, so I see what the intent is with this method. It’s to build the answer through a series of additions, taking four steps on paper plus a number of cognitive judgments along the way. What I can’t see is why anyone would ever need to use this method to actually subtract one number from another. In the old New Math, breaking equations down into components based on the places in the numbers could boost understanding of algebra and help one learn to do more complex equations in the head. That’s clearly not the case here — the “counting-up method” requires a paper calculation and more complicated cognitive judgments than simply subtracting and carrying over. Furthermore, as one of Erick’s commenters noted, even if one argues that it prepares children for higher math functions, how do you deal with negative numbers using this method?
They call me Math in Head Girl, and I won countywide math fairs in grammar school. I think this method is just plain stupid. It’s a lot more work than subtracting, borrowing and carrying numbers, because you have a stack of numbers to add at the end. What was that Orwell said about something so absurd it takes an intellectual to believe it?
Common Core is not a standard or a curriculum; it’s an AGENDA. It’s not about teaching children Math or English or any subject a parent would consider has true value. In fact “Common” core has nothing to do with education; per se’.
http://truthabouteducation.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/in-the-shark-tank/
Liberals over-complicate everything and it fails. Of course, their goal is to conquer minds and make people just believe whatever the “authorities” tell them. Apparently, with many, they have succeeded.
Four steps and a WHOLE LOT OF COUNTING to get to where you would have been much more easily via that ”granny method!”
If these poor children would simply be taught how to ”borrow” from the next column and start at the right end, they’d be done long before they counted all those numbers…..much less adding up those four numbers.
Are schools making learning to impossible that soon they will simply be telling children WHAT to think rather than teaching them HOW to think?
That’s what is behind all of this.
@Nanny+G: Exactly! If our children (future generations ) lack critical thinking skills, they will not be able to defend their selves against tyranny.
This math process was rejected by other country’s because it was a complete failure. So why is it being forced on our children?
Off topic: CC is the result of an agreement between the US and Russia; 1985, 1990. It’s roots are linked to the Prussian education system. (John Taylor Gatto Prussian Education System).
James Milgram on the Common Core Math Standards
http://www.americandeception.com/index.php?page=usercat&catid=9 See 5th document on list.
@Beth just south of Berkeley and just east of San+Francisco:
There also seems to an inconsistency in Common Core’s “adding the stack of numbers at the end”, as it doesn’t specify whether the student should do so using their convoluted addition formula, or by the traditional “granny” method.
What this bizarre social experiment seems to be focused on is not the right answer (if the child uses the granny method common core requires teachers to mark the answer as “wrong”) but to overly complicate and equally confuse students and their parents. Any government official or educator pushing this standard should be impeached, fired or (following the mob rule Democrats love so much,) even dragged out of their cushy office chair and (pick one) (1) tarred and feathered, (2) ridden out of town on a rail, (3) tossed in a dung-heap, and ordered by the community to never return.