Robert Berkman, a veteran math teacher, writes a blog called “Better Living Through Mathematics, where he regularly skewers nonsense.
In this article, he looks closely at a chart that purportedly demonstrates how pathetic is the performance of U.S. adults, compared to many other nations.
Berkman says this may be the “stupidest article about Common Core math program” that he has ever read.
To begin with, the graph does not identify the highest possible score, making it impossible to draw conclusions or comparisons. So one conclusion from the graph, Berkman says, is: “whatever sample of US adults took this test did 88% as well as the adults in the top scoring nation, Japan. I think that’s pretty damned good, considering the United States is second to the world in poverty, leaving Japan in the dust by over 10 percentage points (and I’m sure Japan uses a much higher economic benchmark for poverty than we do here in the US.) Of course, we all know that poverty is the single greatest predictor of poor school performance.”
[Note to Robert Berkman: that “second in the world in poverty” is nonsense, despite the authoritative source. It is a comparison not of all nations, but of the most economically developed nations, and the U.S. is supposedly second to Romania. This is an absurd comparison because Romania doesn’t belong in this group of nations. Romania is an Eastern European nation whose economy was mismanaged and impiverished by central planning for decades. Oh, well, I may never get this error corrected, but I keep trying. The fact is that we have the highest level of child poverty of any advanced nation in the world.]
After pointing out other errors, Berkman writes:
“Finally, this article is yet another example of the “waking up on third base” phenomena, which posits that everything that you see in a Common Core math curriculum is the direct result of the implementation of the Standards. Nothing could be further from the truth: all of the items described on in the article have been documented, published and taught since the NCTM published its curriculum standards a quarter of a century ago. If you’ve been teaching math using a textbook that was published in the last 20 years, you’ve probably seen all this stuff before including, with all deference to Mr. Colbert, the infamous description of a “number sentence.” Telegram for Mr. Colbert: 1989 is writing to tell you to “LOL!”
He notes with dismay that “NCTM actually tweeted the link to this worthless piece of codswallum, and smelling something rotten, I just had to follow the scent.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
lol
Hope you are feeling better this Sunday morning, Diane!
codswallum is an interesting coinage, probably a misremembering of codswallop based on a false etymology (cod + swallow); however, it could well be the case that the etymology is not false at all but that codswallum was itself a mangled version of cod + swallow.
The several suffixes that form nouns from verbs have an “m” at the end: -dom, -ism; and a bunch of English nouns from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew have an “m” ending: encomium, harmonium, addendum (from Latin); apothegm (from Greek); cherubim (from Hebrew, where the m is a plural ending). So, adding an m to make a noun is part of the word-making toolkit in English.
cx: there are several suffixes, of course
Related to CODSWALLOP
Synonyms
applesauce [slang], balderdash, baloney (also boloney), beans, bilge, blah (also blah-blah), blarney, blather, blatherskite, blither, bosh, bull [slang], bunk, bunkum (or buncombe), claptrap, nonsense [British], crapola [slang], crock, drivel, drool, fiddle, fiddle-faddle, fiddlesticks, flannel [British], flapdoodle, folderol (also falderal), folly, foolishness, fudge, garbage, guff, hogwash, hokeypokey, hokum, hoodoo, hooey, horsefeathers [slang], humbug, humbuggery, jazz, malarkey (also malarky), moonshine, muck, nerts [slang], nuts, piffle, poppycock, punk, rot, rubbish, senselessness, silliness, slush, stupidity, taradiddle (or tarradiddle), tommyrot, tosh, trash, trumpery, twaddle
Related Words
absurdity, asininity, fatuity, foolery, idiocy, imbecility, inaneness, inanity, insanity, kookiness, lunacy; absurdness, craziness, madness, senselessness, witlessness; hoity-toity, monkey business, monkeyshine(s), shenanigan(s), tomfoolery; gas, hot air, rigmarole (also rigamarole); double-talk, greek, hocus-pocus
wonderful
Now I will have a ready list to scream at the screen next time I see a talk about education by Arne Duncan or Bill Gates
poppycock is an interesting one
This goes all the way back to Indo-European roots–pap, meaning child or baby + caca meaning–well, you know what that means!
There is very intense competition for “worst article ever written about the Common Core.” I would hate to have to judge THAT competition!
Of course, almost all of those article say the same crap over and over. Really, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike Petrelli and Chester Finn had copies of Neil Gaiman novels hidden away in their desks that they peak at from time to time throughout the day to keep from boring themselves to death.
Rigorous, higher standards!
Outgrit the Singaporeans!
Class size doesn’t matter!
Data and, oh, by the say, data!
cx: articles, by the way
I really have to slow down when I type! too many of these typos!
Just a thought.
Perhaps I am badly misinterpreting the linked article, but I took at least one of its main point to be that essential information was missing from a visual representation of numbers.
And that’s not even considering whether or not the “Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies” is a trustworthy organization and that the [I assume] standardized tests on which the numbers are based tell us anything useful at all.
Worst article ever written about CC math? Perhaps it would be more accurate to put it in the running for one of the most pathetic. But math isn’t among the strong suits of the charterite/privatizer crowd.
Remember, when you can raise students from the 13th percentile to the 90th, what does it matter if you can’t prove it?
There is only one metric that counts: $tudent $ucce$$. And massaging and torturing numbers?
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts — for support rather than for illumination.” [Andrew Lang]
😎
Math isn’t one of the strong suits of those pushing for data-based decision making. You can say that again.
DDDM = numerology
Mr. Berkman is incorrect about the poverty threashholds in Japan and the United States. He links to data based on the UNICEF measure of childhood poverty. In that measure a child lives in a poor household if the household, adjusted for family size and composition, has less than 50% of the median income of that country. Because the median income of the US is higher than Japan, the poverty threshold for a household in the US is higher than in Japan, not lmuch lower as Mr. Berkman speculated. It is important to understand how statistics are constructed.
18.5 x .2 is presented as a complicated math problem and an example of a reason why we need common core math. The author correctly notes that people can just do this on their cell phones, but does not seem to understand that there is nothing wrong with this — just do it on your cell phone.
Beyond that, I don’t know ANYONE — not one single person in our huge family — who doesn’t realize that this is 10% and you double it. $1.85 x 2 is easy — $3.00 – $.30 = $2.70.
Here’s my point: NO ONE needed Common Core to figure this out. What they needed to be was “old enough” and “seeing a practical reason to figure this out”.
And Common Core isn’t going to fix the problem that kids don’t see a point to the math they are taught in school. I have been teaching math for a long time. Most or all of the time “word problems” that are intended to be done with a “system of equations” can actually be worked in a much simpler way (using logic, not silly math tricks). If I tell my beginning Algebra II kids — even the “low track” ones to do the problems WITHOUT USING ALGEBRA, they almost all can. If I tell them to do it using formal algebra, almost no one can and they don’t want to. I get it. Formalized algebra taught in a de-contextualized way is just stupid. THAT’s what Common Core should fix, but alas, absolutely does not.
In fact, because Common Core math is “more shallow topics taught in less time” (not the fewer, deeper of the propaganda / talking points), the population is almost certain to dismiss math as ridiculous / pointless even more often than has been the case.
lol
Your a fool TE to overlook her extremely important point about math education. You must be the type of person who can gaze out at a beautiful forest, and all you can see is the one bent twig.
You must be very talented to understand so much about my personality from three letters.
I am certainly no fan of math education as it is and has been done in public schools. That is why my goal was to move my math talented middle son out of his high school for math as quickly as possible.
Once again you fail to make any sense. Your logical thought processes seem to be stuck on a Mobius strip.
Oh, and by the way reputations are hard to shake.
If your concerned with my reputation, I suspect that it is fairly firmly established after a couple of years posting here.
It’s annoying that WordPress doesn’t have a correction feature. I’m pretty sure that if it had one, Julie would have seen this typo and would have corrected it and people could have spent their time thinking about the significant point she made about the CC$$ instead of wasting their time talking about the typo or, worse, treating the typo as though it were a mortal sin.
little typo there ($4.00, not $3.00), but very well said, Julie!
Bob
Your views on language “acquisition” should inspire every teacher in America to shape their teaching methods with this goal in mind. So many I see seem to 1gnore this monumentally important concept. Do you think that this idea (knowledge acquisition) translates to all other subjects?
Thank you, NY. But this distinction between acquisition and learning is not mine. It’s a well-established finding of the cognitive science of learning, and you are right to say that it applies far beyond language, for most of what we know and believe and can do is implicitly acquired, not learned, and via processes that, like those for language, involve adaptations of existing functional mechanisms of the brain + the perceptual systems (e.g., it contains innate and acquired components).
It’s exciting to me that you see how important this distinction is. It’s one of the most robust findings of contemporary learning science, but a lot of education people and almost all education policy makers are completely clueless about it. Lord knows, the authors of the CCSS were.
This idea should be a guideline for virtually all pedagogy in K-12 classrooms. Why do you think so many educators are clueless? And what can be done to educate the educators about authentic education?
This affirms my own observations and practices. I looked at coaches and realized how players (students) naturally acquire the language of their sport by simply listening and conversing with others. For example, every HS baseball player knows what a “take sign” is without ever copying the definition from an overhead transparency, or studying for a test. Every avid outdoors kid has acquired an extensive set of skills and “subject” specific language and content knowledge regarding fishing or hunting. No textbooks. No note taking. No tests. Why cant teachers present their subjects more like coaches present their sport. Motivation to learn is definitely intrinsic and natural when topics are interesting and compelling. Any teacher that can’t make their subjects come alive should be doing something else.
People become good readers and writers by reading and writing a lot. They read and write a lot when they are engaged in things that they want to learn and to communicate about. By moving our emphasis away from what people are reading and writing about and placing it, instead, on the forms and structures of reading and writing, we dramatically MISTAKE how people, primarily, learn about this stuff. A good writer or a good reader has formed internalized schemata for thousands and thousands of forms that he or she has never stopped to think about explicitly and that were never explicitly taught to him or her. I am NOT arguing that one should NEVER do explicit instruction on literary techniques and structures, not at all. I am saying that doing this almost exclusively MISCONCEIVES AT A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL what reading and writing are about AND how they are PRIMARILY learned beyond the level of elementary decoding skills. It’s breathtaking how many supposed experts in reading and writing instruction haven’t a clue about this. That they haven’t shows how entirely unscientific the field is, how dominated by charlatans.
That’s why I call the CCSS approach to literature
New Criticism Ultra Lite
or
New Criticism for Dummies
People have a sense that there is something wrong when they look at these incredibly convoluted, dreadful CCSS lessons in which the text is treated as simply an arbitrary opportunity to exercise some skill. What’s being done FEELS really unnatural to them. Well, that’s why. It IS unnatural. The explicit skills stuff should be way, way, way down the list of priorities. It should be brought up only
a. to elucidate some point that comes up in the interaction with the text
b. to provide a ready heuristic for the reader or writer
c. on rare occasion, as part of an outline of the theoretical underpinnings of reading and writing
Imagine that you want to learn to build guitars, but your instructor insists that you must learn the theoretical physics that describes the interactions of all the components during the building process.
Or imagine that you were to try to teach your child to walk by asking him or her to master diagrams of his or her muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems and analyses of stop-action photos of people walking.
Pretty idiotic, huh?
But the skills-based approach is completely entrenched in our ed schools. People with PhDs and EdDs and huge reputations have built careers on teaching people to teach skills explicitly and even on teaching them to think about their skills and to think about their thinking about their skills. And most of it is irrelevant rubbish. Not entirely irrelevant–see the three uses for that kind of thing that I mentioned–but mostly irrelevant to the actual process of becoming a skilled reader or writer, someone with a large vocabulary, someone with a robust internal grammar of the language, etc.
And all of that skills-based behavior in classrooms takes people a long, long way from normal, real reading and writing, which is done because the person who is reading is interested IN WHAT HE OR SHE IS READING ABOUT and writes because HE OR SHE HAS SOMETHING TO COMMUNICATE.
CCSS ELA is a lot more of that skills-based idiocy. It takes us much, much further down that nonproductive path based in prescientific, folk notions about how people learn. Writing this backward stuff in stone is really tragic for our country. It’s educational Lysenkoism.
As with everything else that people do, most of what they in some sense “know” about reading and writing they don’t even know that they know. One can do statistical analyses of the work of an accomplished writer and tell him or her an enormous amount of stuff about his or her own style that that person does not know. But that stuff was picked up somewhere. Dyan Thomas wrote as he did in part because he grew up listening to Welsh preachers. He internalized their habitual forms–such as the catalog of grammatically parallel items.
At any rate, kids will read about snakes because they are interested in snakes. And if they do a lot of reading about snakes, they will learn more about reading, far more, than their teachers explicitly teach them and, as I say, far more than anyone knows that they know.
By the time a child is 5 years old, he or she has learned about 10,000 words. That’s roughly one every 2 waking hours. Only a miniscule fraction (far less than 1 percent) of those words were explicitly taught.
The writing system (sound-grapheme correspondences) is somewhat of an exception here, which is why it is valuable to teach phonics as part of a blended program, but in all the grades, this all skills, all the time crap is really, really backward, counterproductive, and, as I say, prescientific because it doesn’t accord with what we know know about the functionality of the mind, most of which is not conscious functionality.
One of the problems in all of this is that there is not yet a really robust model for relations among linguistic units above the sentence level. If we had such a thing in place now, people would readily recognize that most of what’s reflected in that model is neither explicitly learned nor explicitly used.
It’s easy for people to fool themselves into thinking that they are doing consciously what their minds do automatically at a preconscious level. There are thousands and thousands of examples of this in the cognitive science literature. And so all these eduexperts think that they are teaching vocabulary or grammar or structures for writing when almost all of an adult’s competence in these areas has very, very little to do with anything that was explicitly learned or that is explicitly considered when used.
Thank you. NYSED requires use to teach one “academic word of the day” each and every day to improve our students vocabulary. Completely out of context. Students treat it as white noise. Lust another wasted use of time and energy from the know-nothing, know-it-alls. Wish they could read this and understand its value.
Here’s how people actually learn vocabulary: they pick it up in batches of related items when it is encountered in the course of other activity that is to them significant. So, for example, you take an art class at the Y and a couple weeks latter you have learned the meanings of gesso, stippling, filbert brush, titanitum yellow light, underpainting, tableaux, and linseed oil because all these terms were used in the course of your activity. And now you sort of have a notion what saturation means but you are not quite sure about that one. And no one taught you any of those words directly (with one exception) and you did not stop to puzzle when the words were used over which context clue you could pick up on in order to determine the meaning, nor did you attack the words using word analysis. The words were simply used around you by those who knew them, and you “picked them up.” The one exception was the word stippling. At one point, the teacher used the word stippling and you said, “Stippling?” and your fellow student said, “Like this” and dabbed some dots on her canvas, and you said, “Oh.”
NYSED should do a study of students’ knowledge of these words one year later.
I used to do this word a day on the board nonsense. It’s pretty much useless unless the word is one that then gets used a lot and referred back to. A lot of teachers give students these lists of random academic words and weekly quizzes on them. An almost complete waste of time.
Actually two typos I think. If the poster meant to type a $4 instead of a $3 we might have expected the correct answer $3.70, not the $2.70 that was in the post. The poster must have mistyped both the 4 and the 2.
She mistyped the 4 as a 3. Then she completed the calculation based on that mistake. That’s how I read it. So I considered it one oversight of the kind that anyone can make when in a hurry.
I thought that it might be satire, especially because the post differentiates between silly math tricks and logic. Logic is the only math trick there is.
I see your point, TE, but I think it’s legitimate for her to point to the fact that a lot of poorly written math lessons use atomic flyswatters–use a complicated procedure where most people would use a simpler equivalent.
It seems to me mean-spirited for some to attack the poster for a typo, but if one is going to say that logic is the only math trick there is, one has to use the term logic very broadly to include a lot of heuristics of the kind that Polya writes about in How to Solve It and both algorithmic and nonalgorithmic procedures, don’t you agree? I took the poster to be saying that when doing math, people generally try to avoid employing atomic flyswatters of the kind that one encounters in too many lessons in textbooks. However, there is a kind of uninformed criticism of the CCSS in math that has become very common that I find annoying that attacks lessons for not simply employing a standard algorithm for addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division when the point of the lesson is not practice of a standard algorithm but, rather, learning some other concept.
Robert,
I have been repeatedly called an Ann Rand rug sniffer by a poster on this blog without anyone worrying about it being mean spirited (I didn’t even understand it to be a sexually demeaning reference until the same poster started to refer to me as Koch sucker). If my confusion about the nature of the post resulted in my breaking the standards of propriety on this blog I am bewildered, but I certainly apologize.
I do mean logic broadly, and I think that the misunderstanding of what constitutes mathematics is a major problem with mathematics education in K-12.
I agree with you whole-heartedly on both counts, TE! The former is entirely inappropriate, and the latter is a huge problem.
Teacher Julie.
Your analysis of math education is 1000% (Ha) spot on!
This exemplifies the problem CC founders created by refusing to invite smart, veteran math teachers like yourself to their table.
This begs the questions, Were they really that ignorant? or, Did the new standards really matter to them and their true agenda?
Common Core math standards/tests = Weapons of Math Destruction.
“18.5 x .2 is presented . . . .
Beyond that, I don’t know ANYONE — not one single person in our huge family — who doesn’t realize that this is 10% and you double it. $1.85 x 2 is easy — $3.00 – $.30 = $2.70.”
1.85 x .2 does not equal 2.70. It equals .37.
Either my sarcasmometer is way off or your math is way off and your family is in bad need of math remediation.
Duane, read what she said more carefully. There was typo. She wrote $3.00 instead of $4.00 because she was writing quickly. But her reasoning is sound.
Here’s what she meant:
.2 is 10 percent, doubled
So, take ten percent of 18.5 (1.85)
Double that (1.85 = 2.00 – .15, so double that is 4.00 -.30 = $3.70.)
But there is still a misplaced decimal point.
No, Duane. She started with 18.5. She took ten percent of that: 1.85. Then she did the rounding and subtraction (the mental math). So that’s all correct. There was simply this typo–she wrote $3.00 when she meant $4.00. Anyone could make that kind of error in a blog post when writing a hasty note. Her more general point is valuable and interesting.
“THAT’s what Common Core should fix, but alas, absolutely does not.”
Yep!
XO from a long time science teacher.
My mother described her experience attending a one room schoolhouse where all of the elementary students were together in one room with one teacher (back in 1933-41) in the backwoods of Minnesota. The teacher would give the older students, who had already learned how to read, books of poetry to read and memorize and recite to the rest of the class. She loved it. Her vocabulary naturally increased. She was able to spell and write because she had seen lots of words in print and knew how they should be spelled and how beautiful the English language can be in the hands of a poet. She actually became a court reporter later in life and was known for her “clean transcripts” with no grammatical or spelling errors, a rarity, apparently.
The purpose of learning to read has been divorced from exposing students to great literature. That is a sad fact. The Common Core just spits all over great literature and elevates a common magazine article as if it were equal to Shakespeare.
Forcing elementary teachers to concentrate on non-fiction books instead of continuing to expose students to characters who have problems and learn “life lessons” just like they do every day is a huge mistake mandated by the CC. Seven year old students are worried about their loose teeth and how to make friends so they can have someone to sit next to at lunch. They are not, for the most part with some exceptions, incredibly interested in the life cycle of a frog. And they are definitely not interested in discussing what evidence the author presented to establish the main points of the book. How to wreck a reading experience 101.
My grandmother, at the age of 92, would proudly recite a large portion of the opening of Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” which she memorized in a one-room schoolhouse when she was 7 or 8 years old. 🙂
And when she did, she would glory in the beauty of the language and grin from ear to ear. It was a beautiful thing to see.