Largest teachers' union wants changes in Common Core

[angus]

It's actually bringing the critical thinking skills of language arts to math and science and in the calculator/internet age it's a whole lot more important than old-fashioned number crunching.

I couldn't agree more, but if you come up with the right number my standing assumption is that you did figure it out.  Moreover, there may be more than one logical way to proceed, and if the student shows a series of steps different than the one in the teacher-approved manual, but comes up with the correct assumptions without making any bizarre assumptions, then I consider that a success as well.  It is not entirely clear to me that this is the case with the local teachers.  

BTW your example is one I also use in modified form. Your professor was using a problem attributed to Enrico Fermi. He was a strong believer in the importance in estimation and order of magnitude as part of science instruction. To this day the type of problems are called Fermi problems, and your example is in fact the one cited on Wikipedia.

intriguing.  So it wasn't an original example.  At least that explains Chicago and the piano.

[muon2]

It's actually bringing the critical thinking skills of language arts to math and science and in the calculator/internet age it's a whole lot more important than old-fashioned number crunching.

I couldn't agree more, but if you come up with the right number my standing assumption is that you did figure it out.  Moreover, there may be more than one logical way to proceed, and if the student shows a series of steps different than the one in the teacher-approved manual, but comes up with the correct assumptions without making any bizarre assumptions, then I consider that a success as well.  It is not entirely clear to me that this is the case with the local teachers.  

It depends what is being taught. If I want to teach the students a variety of methods to attack a problem, then showing the steps becomes critical. Sometimes there is little use to get a particular answer by a known method if it gives one no insight into how to approach unknown problems. A successful problem solver has an arsenal of techniques, and one challenge for teaching is to add techniques to an existing base. Many of the new standards are designed to highlight techniques, not answers.

[angus]

Many of the new standards are designed to highlight techniques, not answers.

Mightn't that be why the teachers have interpreted their marching orders the way they do?  

Well, whatever the game is, I've convinced my son to play along.  So far, he has been co-operating.  
 
I've looked at the standards and I think they're reasonable, but obviously the standards leave themselves so open to misinterpretation that boys who demonstrate an advanced ability early on are beaten about the head with demagoguery.  I also think I understand the teachers' objections to the implementation.  The point should be to encourage learning and encourage creativity, not stifle it.  It may be that the actual goals were not communicated very well to the school districts.  I suppose any new program will experience growing pains.  
 
In Pennsylvania, advanced reading and mathematics is mandated, but unfunded.  Not long after we moved here they sent home a letter saying they wanted to test my son for what they call a "gifted" program.  We are leery of labeling children, but the only way for him to be assigned advanced work was for us to allow them to test him and then label him as "gifted."  When I asked whether they were under pressure from the state to do this, they said that they were required to ask us for permission to test him, but we were under no obligation to agree to the test.  When I asked them how much money they'd get from the state to offset the costs to the districts of maintaining the "gifted" program, they said none.  Called it an unfunded mandate.  At that point I realized that they weren't in it for the money, and were just playing by their rules, and that, moreover, he'd probably be challenged more if we agreed, so we let them test him.  So now he goes to that gifted class for a couple of hours every Monday and Wednesday morning.  In that class, there are no games.  If the student can come up with the right answer then it's correct.  No one asks the student to take off his shoes and walk through a metal detector (presumably he's already done that upon entry into the campus.  Brave new world.)  The homework is hard.  I usually let him struggle about for a while before offering help.  The language arts portions often stump my wife, although her native language is not English.  In general, she helps him with the math and I with the language arts.  

I'm okay with the concept of the toolbox.  You have a number of tools you might use to help you show that P implies Q.  You can do it by contrapositive, or by contradiction, or directly.  In those sorts of classes obviously it's important that you have some way to measure what's in the head.  Still, if you give a student one mole of argon as a working substance in a carnot engine operating between 300 and 600 K and an initial volume at the beginning of the first (expansion) isotherm, and ask what the volume is at the end of the second (compression) isotherm, and he stares about the room for a few seconds and belts out the correct answer, then I have to respectfully submit that it is not the best approach, either psychologically or pedagically, to fault this student for not explaining to you, and the rest of the class, how he came about that answer.  Of course you'd delight in the opportunity to ask him about it when he next visits your office, and to ask him to consider him to join your research group, but why put him on the spot or embarrass him or make the other students feel inferior?  It just doesn't seem to be helping anyone if the standards are so written that they are interpreted in such a way as to cause teachers to require this sort of defense.

[muon2]

angus, you've highlighted one of the inherent problems with gifted education. The student in your Carnot cycle example may well be showing a gift worthy of special attention. However, I've seen far more papers where the answer is right for the wrong reasons. It's often my fault that I constructed a problem where erroneous reasoning can allow one to coincidentally get the right answer, but I feel some need to make sure that didn't happen. I also see my share of verbal responses in class where the recall someone talking about my lecture from last year and then correctly guess the answer.

[SWE]

Great! Common Core is awful and needs to be brought down.

[Torie]

What is the essence of the case against the "Common Core." I ask, because I was a "common core" guy from day one, via an elite private Grammar school, and then later at the U of C, where the higher education version of the "Common Core" was invented by Maynard Hutchins back in the 1940's and then copied elsewhere, and which required all first year students to basically take the same classes, with some variations on emphasis.  It is what a "liberal arts" education is all about; and it is about, along with learning a trade, living not just life, but the good life,  to wit, it enriches one's life, in ways far beyond the pecuniary. And the tools for all of that were learned in the "Common Core" equivalent in for grammar schools.  A certain body of knowledge needed to be learned to progress, and it really focused on the basics while exploring more peripheral stuff.

[7,052,770]

What is the essence of the case against the "Common Core." I ask, because I was a "common core" guy from day one, via an elite private Grammar school, and then later at the U of C, where the higher education of the "Common Core" was invented by Maynard Hutchins back in the 1940's and then copied elsewhere, and which required all first year students to basically take the same classes, with some variations on emphasis.  It is what a "liberal arts" education is all about, and it is about, along with learning a trade, what living not just life, but the good life, is about, to wit, it enriches it, in ways far beyond the pecuniary. And the tools for all of that were learned in the "Common Core" equivalent in for grammar schools.  A certain body of knowledge needed to be learned to progress, and it really focused on the basics while exploring more peripheral stuff.

On the right, it's because Obama supports it therefore it must be a socialist plot.

On the left, there's some objection from the teacher's unions who are happy doing what they're doing and don't want to change.

[Torie]

That's it Harry?  Nothing more?

[muon2]

That's it Harry?  Nothing more?

I'm afraid Harry is probably right. It's a set of changes that those experts in the trenches knew were needed 20 years ago at the dawn of the web and the tools it would bring to society.