The commies (they call themselves progressives) have always been interested in taking the family down.
The collective is the goal, so one thing is public schools and creating a big divide between children and their parents with every opportunity.
History revised, attitudes revised, old moral stuff out, new lifestyle stuff in.
So this essay is on how Common Core is intentionally different.
It puts the teachers, the indoctrinators in charge–and eliminates parental influence, it even makes parents more than just fuddy duddies, it makes them incompetent in scholarly activities.
Down with the old, up with the new, revolution, hope and change.
John Dewey would be proud, Lenin and Marx are smiling.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/common_cores_dirtiest_trick_dividing_parents_and_children.html
Oh, and John, you undermine your point and hoist your own petard with articles like this. If you point out that it’s a bad idea and that it doesn’t work for a good fraction of people (like what I did), then people will listen to you.
If you declare that it’s communist propaganda dedicated to separating students from parents and undermining the family, people will stop listening after three sentences. Why, because you are making absurd allegations without a shred of evidence. Show me something to back up the claim that New Math has sinister subterfuge as a goal. Give me something to work with other than wild presumption and theorizing.
No, I’m an engineer. My wife’s the teacher. I just happen to disagree with you sharply on this matter. I normally stay quiet because there’s nothing that hasn’t been said already. However, you are going nuts on the common core.
Just because it’s a bad idea doesn’t mean it’s some conspiracy. Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas. Some bad ideas have a lot of weight behind them. However, that doesn’t mean that they are some communist propaganda mess.
I have to agree mostly with Ben. There is no true conspiracy involved here. There are just a bunch of folks who want the “best” for everyone and think they can “policy” it into place. From a managers perspective policy seems delightful. Unfortunately procedure soon replaces reason. The evil part of the equation isn’t common core, its rigorously enforced metrics. The metric forces gaming of the metric and leads to the exact thing that you are trying to avoid.
As Iowahawk proved rather definitively, the gamesmanship of metrics is rampant everywhere.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-
1.html
The only conspiracy here is “Do Gooders” blind to the consequence of their efforts.
ben, i run into you everytime there is something about curricula.
are you a teacher of some kind? if so, recognize i think teacher suck–suck ben.
and your comments are nothing more than excuses for the crappy Deweyite jackass pedagogy that I see all over the school systems.
You always apologize for the current this or that, Ben, and you don’t get the big picture.
Dewey set the stage and created the teaching and curriculum strategy and you are making excuses for what.
You make a point that I am a conspiracy guy–well hey, ben, the evidence is right in front of you–the current professoriate is trying to destroy real learning–they want to create morons or automatons. who do what they are told and have no independent thinking ability or serious approach to scholarship.
This isn’t about destroying math or english or history Ben, this is about those things but also about destroying the culture, and you are a party to it with all your excuses for what’s happening.
Don’t bother me with your faux arguments about how it’s OK. I know what’s OK and it is not.
I ran into “process” being more important than results during the 20 years I my kids took something called “Chicago math” in SW Michigan. I thought the process/method was memorize basics and learn a few simple procedures and getting the wrong answer was not acceptable. 7th grade was dedicated to remedial math for all students. We had home math class.
My father stopped going to school in the 8th grade (depression era). He was better grounded in math and reading than a good number of today’s high school graduates.
I think you’re going a little off the deep end here. Reform mathematics is simply an idea taken too far.
I’ve expressed frustration at the teaching of certain points of algebra, specifically logarithms, which are traditionally taught as a practically magic rearrangement of numbers. Back in my tutoring days, as soon as I showed how it was the opposite of the exponent and taught my students to “log both sides and cancel”, it was much more easily understood.
However, this conceptual approach really fails when taken down to the arithmetic level. You have to develop the ability to think mathematically in order to derive things. That’s a skill that a lot of people just don’t have and some cannot learn very well. It is quite out of reach for a good fraction of 1st graders. For these people, traditional rote and formulas are the only way to learn math. Personally, I am bewildered by the concept of a “method” to do addition. It’s just something that you do.
I’m not going to address the conspiracy theory because that is all that it is.
was there ever any doubt?
http://www.obamasrealfather.com/