Meet the New Common Core

Iglooo
Fri, 09 Oct 2015 12:33:43 +0000

Really, what you should be “against” is incompetent administrators who had no clue on how to implement change.

Well, a policy that can’t be implemented successfully is not a good policy. Policies should be easily adaptable by existing work force. A better measure of a policy is how much the net gain it brings after implementation. Only a bureaucrat will disregard the aspect of implementation. Wasn’t the rail road track invented in America because America at that time didn’t have labor with skills to manufacture european style tracks which called for more precision? I don’t think they sat around lamenting lack of skillful labor.

I believe there exist enough good methods on teaching math. I read Japan implements American methods to successfully teach their students. If so, the weak link is in teacher training, not lack of a policy. They should spend resources on training teachers instead of coming up with methods or a new policy. We have those. What we need is implementation.

This may be a very incorrect thing say but we may be better off to segregate students according to their learning style. Some kids may progress better by mechanically plugging number using “tricks”. Others may need to have quantitative sense before emplying tricks. My D’s experience of learning to read time was instructional. She couldn’t make sense of it until she conceptualized the flowing nature of time and how it was represented in the moving hands of the clock. Once she got that, she could read all the tricky ones. Unfortunately, at school, her first grade teacher gave out a recipe on how to read time, you cut it four pieces, it’s quarter till…etc. She could conceptually reconcile cutting flowing time into pieces. It didn’t seemed to bother other kids. She shun math until calculus in HS. Math finally made sense in calculus.