Common Core Math Worksheet Doesn’t Add Up
We recently reported that a Common Core test featured a completely unsolvable math problem.
Now, some tweets featured in Twitchy discussions are centering on a worksheet that would befuddle a math savant. It is being given to fourth graders.
…The incomprehensible directions tell the poor nine-year-old souls forced to endure the worksheet to “use number bonds to help you skip-count by seven by making ten or adding to the ones.”
At the top left corner of the worksheet are the all-capitalized words “NYS COMMON CORE MATHEMATICS CURRICULUM.”
My 9 year old sisters math homework with this “common core” shit. WHAT ARE THESE DIRECTIONS. pic.twitter.com/GNw0uumhuR
— Lauren (@HollaAtMe_Baby) January 21, 2014
A subsequent Twitter conversation between the tweeter Lauren, who is trying to make sense of the assignment for her little sister, and someone named Relle is ribald and hilarious.
This awful set of homework problems is the latest in an ever-growing series of stories demonstrating the awfulness of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a curriculum — but don’t call it a curriculum! — currently being implemented by 45 states and the District of Columbia.
In December, Twitchy found the most egregiously awful math problem the Common Core had produced yet until that point.
In November, Twitchy collected several more incomprehensible, unintentionally hilarious Core-aligned worksheets and tests.
In September, a father was violently arrested for expressing his frustrations about the implementation of the Common Core at a public forum in the suburbs of Baltimore.
Also, over the summer, The Daily Caller exposed a video in which a curriculum coordinator in suburban Chicago perkily explained that students can be totally right if they say 3 x 4 = 11 as long as they spout something about the necessarily faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong answer.
Here’s another impossibly stupid Common Core math worksheet (The Daily Caller)
Comments
Sadly, I must disagree.
The bizarre jargon in this example notwithstanding, this method of solving arithmetic problems is perfectly valid. It’s a good mental exercise, and develops familiarity with the associative property. It will work for some children, but not for others.
Objections to particular aspects of a government-imposed curriculum distract from the real issue, which is that it’s a government-imposed curriculum. Such “one size fits all” solutions are guaranteed to be inappropriate for a significant fraction of children. Stop complaining about details and do something about the root problem. Get your children out of the government schools. Send them to private schools. Home-school them. Don’t wait until the US becomes like Germany.
Some parents are truly unable to do this, but many are ignorant of the situation, have misplaced priorities, or are ducking their responsibilities.
“Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.”