Matt Barnum, writing in Chalkbeat, describes the mixed reactions of high school students to Common Core math.
Some hated it.
Some liked it.
Some found it confusing.
The Common Core standards were supposed to get students to understand math more deeply. For some California high school students, it didn’t work out that way.
“I like working in the old books, because they actually explain it to me,” one said. “Do you want me to learn it? Or do you want me to stare at the problem?”
That’s one response from a survey of students who experienced the shift to the new standards in their math and English classes. The study is quite limited, emerging from interviews from just 54 high-achieving seniors. But it gets at something often overlooked in the political controversy that would eventually surround the standards, which most states adopted in 2010: what it felt like for students to see their classrooms change.
Some of the student’s responses, published last month in a peer-reviewed academic journal, may be surprising. Many blamed the Common Core for encouraging more group work — something they almost universally disliked. In some schools, though, the students appreciated what they perceived as a move away from teacher-led instruction.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“At the same time, author Suneal Kolluri of the University of Southern California writes, “If schools can improve their execution of the higher-order thinking and collaboration skills they are just now beginning to incorporate into their classrooms, the Common Core reform may be a small step in the right direction for improving college readiness.””
You’ll have to excuse Mr./Ms. Kolluri, s/he’s been in a coma for the past couple decades.
““You’re put into a group and you guys are supposed to try to solve a problem that you’ve never been taught before,” said another. “How are you supposed to do that? None of your group members know what they’re doing, and you don’t either.””
This makes me want to weep. Our students are so programmed that they can’t begin to solve a problem without being told what to do. What do these kids do when they encounter a problem in the real world? Oh, wait, silly me, these kids have never encountered the real world. They are kept on a tight leash at home and at school. Must keep them safe, you know!
For the record, every bit of research on the topic shows that kids learn best from being mostly left alone to figure out problems on their own with perhaps a nudge or two. Kids who are shown how to solve a problem only learn how to solve that particular problem and are helpless to solve other related problems, and even the knowledge of how to solve that problem fades quickly.
“Some students said that it was unfair to tie their grades to the performance of others….”
Ah, yes, fair point and therein lies the problem! If “learning” is all about the grades, all the kids care about is the quickest way to the best grade. Maybe if we ditch grades, learning could be about, well, learning. What a crazy idea!
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Dienne77, can you supply some links or bibliographic references for that research? The value of group work for literature study is something I’m interested in researching further. Maybe you could supply a name or two.
The pitfalls of standard approaches to group work for high-achieving students are pretty well known. I’d like to know if non-standard approaches have been studied. Some versions of so-called literature circles might fit into the non-standard category.
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Likewise in ELA, where teachers and students are commanded to do “close-reading” of texts that teachers are explicitly told NOT to provide context or scaffolding for.
You can just imagine the love of reading this kind of thing generates.
I teach English language learners, and it’s utter madness to expect my students to understand what they’re reading unless they’re given a lot of contextual support.
But Common Core is not about understanding; it’s about training for obedience in the classroom and workplace, for teachers and students both.
What better way to train young people for the tedious, de-skilled, authoritarian, heavily-surveilled and absurd jobs (or “bulls%#* jobs” as described by anthropologist David Graeber in his latest book) they’ll have to simultaneously fight and settle for in the future?
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Dienne, you seem to confuse correct experiments and deductive reasoning with pulling an answer from one’s butt. The latter takes some inventive thinking, and it took a very small number of mathematicians, compared to the population of the planet, several hundred years to progress from textual Arabic algebra to where we are now. You cannot expect high school kids, who may have nothing to eat for dinner, to come with fresh ideas out of nowhere.
So, all that is left for the kids to do is deductive methods – which are not taught, or correctly done experiments, which are not taught either. So, they are SOL. With a traditional curriculum they at least would be math literate and would know some algebra. Back to New Math debates, it seems, despite that these methods had been proven to not work in school setting.
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Back Again,
You can expect high school students as well as younger students, to think creatively about mathematics.
You might be interested in “Lockhart’s Lament”, an essay about the shortcoming of the traditional curriculum by a mathematician who teachers K-12 in NYC. He turned it into a book, but here is a link to the original essay: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
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Let us not pretend that there are only the two extremes: kids have to discover the whole of math on their own and kids have to learn math by rote memorizing of procedures.
Kids like to solve puzzles more than watch other people solve puzzles—irrespective of their poverty level, race or gender. So let’s not bore them with 100% direct instruction—even if that seems to speed up their learning in the beginning.
But kids enjoy solving puzzles only if they know the meaning of the pieces they have to fit into into the puzzle. If a kid doesn’t know that a square doesn’t fit into a circular hole, asking her to solve the puzzle would be frustratingly difficult for her.
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“Kids like to solve puzzles” – I don’t mind kids trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, but this should be done in kindergarten or first grade, not in high school. High school should deal with more abstract matters, with symbolic algebra, with geometric proofs.
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This might have made me weep before I saw what was going on in the classroom.
But I’ve seen what is going on in the classroom and I totally get what the kids are saying.
My daughter spent her 6th grade year with CPM, which I think is the Worst Curriculum Ever. The kids worked in groups on problems out of the CPM math book in the classroom. There are pretty much no worked examples in the book. The teacher walked around asking questions but not telling the kids what to do.
One day, a multiplying fraction problem came up. This fraction had god awful numbers that could be easily cross-reduced. My daughter had learned this technique in another curriculum that I made her do after school and she quickly cross reduced and solved the problem. Her friends, though, had only learned via the school and no teacher had ever directly explained to them how to cross reduce. So those kids multiplied numbers. Number after number after number in the numerator. They got a god-awful number. Then they multiplied again. Number after number after number in the denominator. Then they got another god-awful number. Then they divided, one god-awful number into the other.
Meanwhile, my daughter was twiddling her thumbs.
After they finished, she said, “Why didn’t you cross-reduce?”
They said, “Huh?”
And then she proceeded to teach her fellow 6th graders, via direct instruction, the method of cross reducing that she had learned from another curriculum that I made her do after school.
She had to do this for all the groups she was in.
It would have been easier to just give the kids a worksheet, with specific worked examples, in the first place. If you want critical thinking, you can get it by applying the fundamentals to a well designed problem set. But you have to have the fundamentals to apply in the first place, and the kids are supposed to discover the fundamentals nowadays.
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Hopefully your daughter understands intuitively why cross multiplication works.
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“Hopefully your daughter understands intuitively why cross multiplication works.” – Máté, she was not solving a proportion, she was reducing a fraction.
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Dienne, I agree with you.
I’m a middle school math teacher and I do teach that way: “here’s a problem; how can you solve it?” The kids have so much fun. (I say, “Want me to give you a hint?” and they all say, “No, no, no!”
But the CC curriculum, if I teach it the way it is provided to me, is dead and disconnected compared to that. I still teach my way; one day, the district might tell me I can’t. I hope not.
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What’s the median income in your community?
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Incidentally, it should be noted, that this survey was limited to “high achieving students” – i.e., those students who get good grades and good test scores. Those students for whom “learning” almost inherently means performing up to other people’s standards. So, yes, it’s completely understandable that they’d be frustrated by trying to learn to other people’s standards if those other people aren’t explicit about what exactly they’re looking for.
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Ah the rigors of Common Core math in New York where a passing score in grade 9 Algebra 1 is a whopping 34%.
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Cut scores, rager, the ever ubiquitous cut scores. . .
. . . determined by ? ? ?
“But, but those tests are objective!”
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The setting of Cut scores is completely subjective
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Exacto.
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“The Hokey Mathy”
You put your cut score in
You take your cut score out
You put your cut score in
Then you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Mathy
And you turn yourself around
That’s what it’s all about!
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The funny thing is that the Deformers don’t even realize that the cut score undermines their entire argument for “objectivity”.
Deformer arguments are almost always like this. They draw some highly “precise” conclusion from some totally fudged assumptions.
For example, they report “a teacher’s VAM score is 6.6789” when the the standard error that THEY are reporting for that teacher’s score exceeds the reported score by a wide margin. (Not sure if they are still doing it, but Florida was actually doing this at one point)
The hilarious thing is they don’t even appreciate how dumb it makes them look when they do these things
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The full report is behind a paywall. The abstract seems to reflect an uncritical acceptance of the CCSS as carriers of a mandate to emphasize collaboration and critical thinking in Math and ELA.
The standards themselves, as written, do not emphasize collaboration.
ELA Grades 9-10 “Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products, taking advantage of technology’s capacity to link to other information and to display information flexibly and dynamically.”
ELA Grades 11-12 “Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information.”
The standards for Mathematical Practice are not really grade specific. They are supposed to be integrated with Mathematical Content Standards. My key word searches produced nothing for group work, collaboration, and “shared” work.
Higher-order thinking is in narratives about the intent of the CCSS but not in the standards for ELA or Math.
Of course, the writers/promoters of the CCSS had about four or five positions about whether the standards did or did not specify methods of instruction, did or did not put constraints on curricula.
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“Higher-order thinking is in narratives about the intent of the CCSS but not in the standards for ELA or Math.”
I’m not an expert, but I believe that’s because the standards themselves are supposed to be operationalized – as in, what are students supposed to be able to do? It’s really hard (impossible?) to operationalize abstract concepts like “critical thinking”. What specifically would a student have to do to show “critical thinking” and how is that going to be taught? Anything that can be taught and reproduced in terms of an operationalized standard is by definition not critical thinking. We can teach and make students perform proxies for critical thinking (e.g., “students will recognize logical errors” or some such), but it’s still just repetition of a taught behavior. We can’t operationalize the mental processes of “critical thinking”.
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My son doesn’t mind Common Core math. He has been using something called “Singapore math” since 3rd grade though, and it is supposedly a lot like Common Core so maybe that’s it.
I don’t know the merits of Singapore math but our whole district uses it in the lower grades.
He DOES complain about Common Core English though and I have to agree with him. How they managed to suck all the joy out of reading fiction I do not know, but they succeeded. I followed one of his 7th grade common core poetry assignments and by the time they were through taking apart that poem they had basically beat all the life out of it.
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The common core has been essentially accepted and renamed under the direction of Candace McQueen. Some of the things I have seen my daughter do are good practice. Many of the concrete items that my partner in crime in the Algebra classroom had to teach are what we used to call Algebra II. My feeling is that the common core approach does push teachers in the direction of group work. Some teachers like it, some do not. I say it’s my name over the door. Let me do what I think is right in conjunction with good professional discussion with my fellow teachers. The biggest crime I see in the implementation to these statements about topics (standards are pieces of steel that sit in vaults to make sure everybody measures things the same) is saying that every child should……
Every child should not do anything at the same age, and introducing math concepts to a child who is not ready to learn them is sheer stupidity. Thus the error in the whole standards movement. Human behavior spreads across a wide spectrum, not because of teachers but because of biology.
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And quietly waiting on deck . . . the NGSS. Another “standards” fail in the making.
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My middle school teaching wife is looking at that next year. All ecology, field biology, earth science, all gone from her curriculum. NGSS students will not be able to tell a titmouse from a toadstool. But they will be able to talk about molecules and sound intelligent to a politician. Anybody sounds intelligent to some politicians.
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“Politicians on Science”
If you say “atom”
They ask you ’bout Eve
If you say “vacuum”
They ask you to clean
If you say “climate”
They say “It’s a hoax”
Pols on the science
Are nothing but jokes
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With apologies, SDP:
A political leader named Paul
Was stuck permanently in a mall.
What is nature, now what?
Let us concrete every lot.
Those trees and those critters have gall.
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As David Coleman would say: “We don’t give a shit what high schoolers say about Common Core Math.”
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I have to deal with 4th grade common core math. It drives me nuts on almost a daily basis.
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Care to elaborate?
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Seriously? I already quoted this article last week. It is not the Common Core, which is only as set of requirements, it is not a curriculum. It is NCTM Standards, are you people blind to see this? NCTM created its Standards in 1989, they were disaster, California created its standards in 1997, then NCTM retreated, then Common Core emerged, of which NCTM was a supporter and one of the founding members: http://www.corestandards.org/assets/k12_statements/National-Council-of-Teachers-of-Mathematics-Statement-of-Support.pdf In the PDF there is a link that was leading to the joint statement, in which NCTM, the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM), the Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics (ASSM), and the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) had xpressed support for implementing the common core standards. The link is dead now, figures.
So,after the 1997 California stadards had been accepted, NCTM retreated and re-grouped, they helped forming Common Core, they infected Common Core with ideas about project-based context-based group-oriented integrated math, so Common Core officially supports traditional AGA as well as integrated math, which is innocent enough, but then integrated math was pushed to the forefront, because “all other countries have intergrated math” with no specific references given, not a single one! So integrated math is now all the rage in the U.S., with districts switching to it from AGA. Now, if you look at these integrated programs, they all are created according to NCTM standards, seeded with NSF funding, now private copyrighted programs. So, ultimately, in CCSSM, NCTM was able to push its agenda twenty years later. California 1997 Standards are in tatters. Algebra is back to 9th grade, and is diluted. Districts that abandoned junk like Core-Plus math twenty years ago are taking it back. It is insurgence, it is a guerilla war.
Common Core is not a thing in itself that appeared from nowhere. It is a part of long-term strategy. Diane, you as a historian should be better in tracking seismic changes like this.
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I am well aware of the origins of Common Core and its role in “systemic reform.” Not a stand alone set of standards, but the link that connects standards, curriculum, assessments, teacher training, and everything else.
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Ah, I get it. You’re a rephormer. Hence the “death trap” description of public schools. Typical.
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I get it too: you have problems with reading comprehension, but don’t despair, this is common among the visitors of this board. Try not just typing slower next time, but reading slower as well. Maybe reading three times in a row will do the trick.
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There is an interesting graph in this article about Common Core in California.
Prior to Common Core, 59% of Californians were taking 8th grade Algebra. This last year, only 19% of Californians were taking 8th grade Algebra.
https://www.hoover.org/research/californias-common-core-mistake
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Because according to 1997 California standards algebra was taught in 8th grade. Now California has been pushed 25 years back simply by switching to Common Core and choosing integrated math curricula.
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I think the problems with CC is perfectly described in this blog post which compares a Finnish and a US first grade tests.
http://taughtbyfinland.com/first-grade-math-tests-in-american-and-finnish-classrooms/
Simply looking at the two tests is enough: you can easily understand the Finnish test without knowing Finnish, while you may have to reread some questions in the US one.
Finnish
US
Click to access the-math-test.pdf
The US early emphasis on word problems to connect math with (fake) real life is one of the basic issues with CC. This corresponds to the close reading nonsense. The other basic issue is insisting on kids’ giving logical , detailed explanations for concepts they can easily understand intuitively (such as, they have no problem understanding the difference between 12 and 21, but CC wants kids to explain the difference every time they see it). This corresponds to poem analysis until the poem is dead—as you guys mentioned it before.
If I had to give a single sentence to describe the problem with the CC math: it wants to take art out of math and replace it with logic.
Probably, the same could be said about ELA, but I am not an expert on that.
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Why do most kids dislike math?
Because they suck at it.
Why do most kids suck at math?
Because math standards suck.
Why do math (NCTM aka CC) standards suck?
Because they treat math as an end – instead of a means,
The eternal quest for the “right”, random, meaningless number lacks the meaningful connections that human intelligence demands. If any other subject were taught this way kids would be praised for spewing the “right” word, absent of any context. Talk to any kid who sucks at math and they will tell you that the numbers have no meaning to them. Kids who are good at math are just better rule followers (order of operations etc.)
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Bzz! You missed. NCTM and CC alike are context-based. Their problem, they have too much context and too little symbolic algebra.
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You sound like the classic math teacher, so enamored with symbols and arcane rules, while ignoring the meaning of numbers. Arithmetic is far more important for children to learn than mathematics. But you come come across as a rather combative soul, so bring it on.
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Rage: Do you expect anything more than uncooked statements and insults out of this Trumpster?
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“Arithmetic is far more important for children to learn than mathematics.: – Reading in English is far more important than reading.
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Mate, so far you are the one spitting insults and making friends with strangers to legitimize your attack, a very old trick, but I don’t care. After you confused reducing a fraction with cross-multiplication, I don’t know whether you are really a mathematcian.
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