Common Core Ed, Math, and Dumbing Down

You Won’t Believe The Method That Common Core Is Using To Teach Our Kids Subtraction

Common Core Subtraction

The dumbing down of America is accelerating.  A massive federal takeover of education known as “Common Core” is attempting to impose nationwide academic standards on public schools throughout the entire country.  Thanks to the backing of billionaire Bill Gates, endless promotion by the U.S. Department of Education, and financial bribes to state governments by the Obama administration, 45 states and Washington, D.C. have already agreed to implement the full Common Core standards in their schools.  Unfortunately, these “standards” are doing to public education what Obamacare is doing to our health care system – absolutely ruining it.  Just look at how basic math instruction has changed.  Posted below is a comparison between the “old method” of subtraction and the “new method” of subtraction being taught in many of our schools.  When I first came across this on Facebook, I thought that it was a joke…

Common Core Subtraction

I thought that there was no possible way that this could be real.  I really thought that this must have come from some sort of parody website.

But it is actually true.

Here is another example of this.  The following is an incredibly bizarre Common Core math problem and the response by one very frustrated parent that has gone viral all over the Internet recently…

Common Core Math Problem

The frustration being experienced by that parent is quite understandable.  When I first looked at that math question, I could almost feel myself getting dumber while I read it.

Is this kind of “math” really preparing our kids for the real world?

I think not.

But these are the kinds of questions that textbook writers come up with as they attempt to implement the standards of Common Core

The question appears to be aiming for several of the main Common Core math standards for second grade:

1) A requirement that students understand place value, for instance, that “100 can be thought of as a bundle of ten tens — called a ‘hundred.’”

2) That students be able to “add and subtract within 1000, using concrete models or drawings and strategies based on place value … and relate the strategy to a written method.” Also that they “understand that in adding or subtracting three-digit numbers, one adds or subtracts hundreds and hundreds, tens and tens, ones and ones; and sometimes it is necessary to compose or decompose tens or hundreds.”

3) That they can “explain why addition and subtraction strategies work, using place value and the properties of operations.”

4) And that they can “represent whole numbers as lengths from 0 on a number line diagram with equally spaced points corresponding to the numbers 0, 1, 2, …, and represent whole-number sums and differences within 100 on a number line diagram.”

Here is another example of some Common Core math…

Common Core Math

What?

Are you kidding me?

Why make things so convoluted?

Are they actually trying to make our kids hate math more than they already do?

And old terms such as “add” and “subtract” are out.  As you can see from the “Common Core – Parent Cheat Sheet” posted below, our kids are now learning how to “increase” and “decrease”…

Common Core Letter

And of course Common Core is not just messing with math.

Just check out the 4th grade homework assignment posted below…

Common Core 4th Grade Assignment

If you cannot read what it says in the picture, here is a transcript of the text…

Ruby sat on the bed she shared with her husband holding a hairclip. There was something mysterious and powerful about the cheaply manufactured neon clip that she was fondling suspiciously. She didn’t recognize the hairclip. It was too big to be their daughter’s, and Ruby was sure that it wasn’t hers. She hadn’t had friends over in weeks, but here was this hairclip, little and green with a few long black hair strands caught in it. Ruby ran her fingers through her own blonde hair. She had just been vacuuming when she noticed this small, bright green object under the bed. Now their life would never be the same. She would wait here until Mike returned home.

Why is Ruby so affected by the hairclip?

How has the hairclip affected Ruby’s relationship?

From where did the hairclip most likely come?

Why in the world are 4th grade students being taught lessons about husbands cheating on their wives?

Is this appropriate?

Unfortunately, this kind of inappropriate material can be found throughout Common Core-based textbooks all over the country.

Those promoting Common Core have gone to great lengths to make it appear that teachers, parents and students are embracing these new standards, but as Alex Newman recently detailed, that is not the case at all.  In fact, there has been a huge backlash against Common Core even in bastions of liberalism such as New York…

While the Big Business front group has been producing ads purporting to show that “teachers” support the standards, that lie is easily put to rest by witnessing the revolt among teachers in New York, where the Common Core roll-out has advanced faster than in other states. There, the board of the state teachers union voted unanimously against Common Core as it has been implemented so far. New York State Assemblyman Al Graf, a member of the Assembly Education Committee with a degree in education, even told The New American that the controversial standards represent “state-sponsored child abuse.” Even the governor in the establishment stronghold has been forced to retreat slightly on Common Core in the face of the public uprising. Opponents of the education takeover say this is just the start.

We live at a time when Americans have already become incredibly dumbed down.

Do we really want to sink even lower?

Posted below is stunning video of an Illinois Curriculum Director explaining that under Common Core, it is okay for children to say that “three times four equals eleven” as long as they can give the reasons for their answer…

What will our country look like if this insanity is allowed to continue?

At this point, only 43 percent of all Americans aged 18 to 24 can correctly point out the state of Ohio on a map of the United States.

How much dumber can we get and still survive as a nation?

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

from:    http://thetruthwins.com/archives/you-wont-believe-the-method-that-common-core-is-using-to-teach-our-kids-subtraction

MARCOS TORRES

The dumbing down of elementary school children has reached epidemic proportions. They can no longer make any informed decisions due to the quantity of misinformation, falsities and deliberate use of distraction, all while imposing academic standards not even fit for a primate.

 

One of most significant issues facing youths in this era is the deteriorating education system which does not respond to their needs. Couple that with a system that now stresses collecting useless knowledge without any understanding its value and you have a recipe for disaster for new generations.

 

For future generations to learn what society has become, why we have the problems we do in the world, and why adults never progress beyond many of their mistakes, it will be necessary to move out of the current educational paradigm and into a new one. This will involve a systematic deprogramming and deschooling of all children in developed nations.

 

Current curriculums focus on psychologically conditioning children to fail. They form educational clutter and complexities which are completely unnecessary to the developing mind. They force kids to adhere to a curricula that quashes their natural inclination to and ask questions especially pertaining to logic. Their knowledge is being constructed to have no value in the real world.

 

A massive federal takeover of education known as “Common Core” is attempting to impose nationwide academic standards on public schools throughout the entire country.

 

Thanks to the backing of billionaire Bill Gates, endless promotion by the U.S. Department of Education, and financial bribes to state governments by the Obama administration, 45 states and Washington, D.C. have already agreed to implement the full Common Core standards in their schools. Common core has nothing to do with education, but more psychological programing and obedience, while refuting any logic.
Read more at http://www.realfarmacy.com/you-wont-believe-the-way-theyre-teaching/#ejKfMlDJLAfS80kX.99

MARCOS TORRES

The dumbing down of elementary school children has reached epidemic proportions. They can no longer make any informed decisions due to the quantity of misinformation, falsities and deliberate use of distraction, all while imposing academic standards not even fit for a primate.

 

One of most significant issues facing youths in this era is the deteriorating education system which does not respond to their needs. Couple that with a system that now stresses collecting useless knowledge without any understanding its value and you have a recipe for disaster for new generations.

 

For future generations to learn what society has become, why we have the problems we do in the world, and why adults never progress beyond many of their mistakes, it will be necessary to move out of the current educational paradigm and into a new one. This will involve a systematic deprogramming and deschooling of all children in developed nations.

 

Current curriculums focus on psychologically conditioning children to fail. They form educational clutter and complexities which are completely unnecessary to the developing mind. They force kids to adhere to a curricula that quashes their natural inclination to and ask questions especially pertaining to logic. Their knowledge is being constructed to have no value in the real world.

 

A massive federal takeover of education known as “Common Core” is attempting to impose nationwide academic standards on public schools throughout the entire country.

 

Thanks to the backing of billionaire Bill Gates, endless promotion by the U.S. Department of Education, and financial bribes to state governments by the Obama administration, 45 states and Washington, D.C. have already agreed to implement the full Common Core standards in their schools. Common core has nothing to do with education, but more psychological programing and obedience, while refuting any logic.
Read more at http://www.realfarmacy.com/you-wont-believe-the-way-theyre-teaching/#ejKfMlDJLAfS80kX.99

Math, Power, & the Language of the Universe

Math: Your Secret Weapon Against Wall Street and the NSA

Edward Frenkel wants you to understand mathematics so economists, bankers, corporations, and intelligence agencies can’t manipulate you anymore.

—By and

| Fri Feb. 28, 2014
Edward Frenkel. Elizabeth Lippman

As Edward Frenkel sees it, the way we teach math in schools today is about as exciting as watching paint dry. So it’s not surprising that when he brings up the fact that he’s a mathematician at dinner parties, eyes quickly glaze over. “Most people, unfortunately, have a very bad experience with mathematics,” Frenkel says. And no wonder: The math we learn in school is as far from what Frenkel believes is the soul of mathematics as a painted fence is from “The Starry Night” by Van Gogh, Frenkel’s favorite painter.

The Russian born University of California-Berkeley mathematician, whose day job involves probing the connections between math and quantum physics, wants to change that. Rather than alienating drudgery, Frenkel views math as an “archipelago of knowledge” that’s universally available to all of us, and he’s been everywhere of late spreading the word. In particular, Frenkel is intent on warning us about how people are constantly using (or misusing) math to get our personal data, to hack our emails, to game our stock markets. “The powers that be sort of exploit our ignorance, and manipulate us more when we are less aware of mathematics,” said Frenkel on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. If you hated math in high school, maybe that will catch your attention.

Frenkel’s paean to math begins with an emphasis on its unifying nature. To him, math—not religion—is the one shared body of firm, unchanging knowledge that we all possess and that nobody can ever take away from us. “You meet someone, you don’t know where they come from, what language they speak, what is their background,” he says. “But you already know that there is so much you have in common, because all the mathematical ideas that have ever been discovered, we all share them.” If you met an alien intelligence, the same would be true. Math never changes. It sometimes has discoverers, but never authors or owners. “It’s a great equalizer,” Frenkel says.

The implications of math’s universality, incidentally, are downright spooky. Take this New York Times essay by Frenkel, contemplating whether the fact that math works so perfectly and without fail suggests we might be living in a Matrix-like simulation. For a while, it was the most viewed article on the paper’s website. The question of why math works to describe the universe, even as we also just happen to have brains that can understand it, is a pretty momentous one. Or as Galileo put it:

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

Such contemplations have driven more than one scientist to God. But then, hey, it could just be Agent Smith.

Deep philosophical dives aren’t Frenkel’s only approach to math popularization: His leading approach is egalitarian. Liberal. He argues that today, and often to our peril, we leave the tough math to experts—whether they are working on quantum physics, stock market trajectories, or encryption systems that are supposed to protect our data.

But our mathematical illiteracy can have disastrous consequences. Case in point: Frenkel blames the global economic crisis of 2008-09 on inadequate mathematical models used by bankers and traders to predict the financial markets. “We should all have access to the mathematical knowledge and tools needed to protect us from arbitrary decisions made by the powerful few in an increasingly math-driven world,” writes Frenkel in his book, Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. “Where there is no mathematics, there is no freedom.”

Or take another example: Last year in Slate, Frenkel explained how the NSA manipulated math in order to install secret “backdoors” in the encryption systems that are supposed to protect our data. That’s what allows the agency to hack into our emails and personal information. The math is very high level, involving a field called “elliptic curve cryptography,” but in this highly watched YouTube video Frenkel explains it pretty simply:

Or take yet another example of people using math to take advantage of us. Frenkel has also explored how attempted changes to the formula for calculating the consumer price index, or CPI—a measure of inflation that is crucial to any number of economic policies and decisions—in effect represent a stealth way to raise our taxes and cut Social Security benefits. But we just shrug because it’s math, says Frenkel. “I’m not even going to try to understand what this formula is,” he says, summing up the typical thought process. “If they’re telling me it should be replaced, it should be replaced.”

In other words, you might call it the politically progressive, look-out-for-the-little-guy case for math literacy. “Mathematics equals rigor plus intellectual integrity times reliance on facts,” adds Frenkel in his book.

Certainly, Frenkel makes a strong case that going through the world in a math-illiterate state is equivalent to having your defenses down. You won’t understand the algorithms that Facebook, Amazon, and Google are using to populate your screen with stuff they want you to buy. You won’t know how safe you are on the internet. And you won’t see the next big economic shenanigan coming until it’s too late.

But the question is, is such understanding really possible or plausible for most people? Most of us think that in order to truly appreciate the mysterious beauty of mathematics, we need to study it intensely for a long period of time. Not so, insists Frenkel. While most of us learn the basics of biology in school and have at least a rudimentary understanding of fundamental concepts like genetics and evolution, we generally don’t even know what the fundamental concepts of high-level mathematics are. But Frenkel insists that we need not suffer through years of math study to grasp the key mathematical ideas. Rather, we can learn “a few chords,” he says, just as we can on the guitar.

So here comes one of those chords: Frenkel thinks that rather than learning something ancient and dry like Euclidean geometry, we should all understand the principle of symmetry. It’s a very simple idea, but also a concept that is “incredibly powerful,” says Frenkel, and one that is relevant across geometry, algebra, and other aspects of math. An object is symmetrical insofar as it is the same no matter what you do to it; it is invariant despite transformations. Like a round glass: “If I turn away, and you rotate it, and I look back, I will not know the difference,” says Frenkel.

Symmetry may seem like a simple idea. But the mathematics of symmetry quickly grow elaborate, and thinking about symmetry actually played an important role in the discovery of quarks, the elementary particles that comprise protons and neutrons.

Certainly, symmetry is not the kind of thing that you learned in your boring high school math classes; and for Frenkel, that’s the problem. “What most people talk about when they say the word ‘math’ is not really math—it is painting fences,” says Frenkel. Not only is that a tragedy, it’s a disadvantage.

And that’s why you should care about math. Forget the idea that it’s alienating and hard. According to Frenkel, life is hard without it.

To listen to the full podcast interview with Edward Frenkel, you can stream below:

(Check out link for podcast)

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion about whether offshore wind farms can protect our coasts from hurricanes, and new insights on the possible physical location of memory within the brain.

from:    http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/inquiring-minds-edward-frenkel-math-doesnt-suck

5 Myths About Girls and the Sciences

Top 5 Myths About Girls, Math and Science

LiveScience Staff
Date: 27 August 2007 Time: 10:10 AM ET
-IMAGEALT-
Participants in the Integrated Science Teaching Enhancement Partnership Program. InSTEP is part of the NSF’s Graduate Fellowships in K-12 Education Program and is designed to foster student interest in science while boosting teacher confidence in integrated science content and inquiry-based instruction.
CREDIT: InSTEP Program, Florida Institute of Technology

The days of sexist science teachers and Barbies chirping that “math class is tough!” are over, according to pop culture, but a government program aimed at bringing more women and girls into science, technology, engineering and math fields suggests otherwise.

Below are five myths about girls and science that still endure, according to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Research on Gender in Science and Engineering (GSE) program:

to read more, go to:    http://www.livescience.com/7349-top-5-myths-girls-math-science.html