Life’s a Traveling Circus
Life’s a Traveling Circus
(The title of this post is a not-so-subtle play on all the “for Dummies” books proliferating in the publishing world.)
Boy, the more I try to get organized and post on a regular basis, the more delayed I become! However, we’ve moved into our new house, pretty much everything is unpacked and in place, it’s beginning to seem like home, so I really have to quit making excuses!
This is actually everything I dreamed it would be; close to the kids, having the grandkids over whenever they want, Mike and Jesse watching football, cooking and shopping with the girls. It’s my idea of heaven. I can be the kind of Grandma I was raised with.
And being of a conservative nature and Objectivist philosophy, I can also have an active participation in the education my grandkids are being given, which, sad to say, in my opinion, leaves a lot to be desired. My granddaughter is in the sixth grade, my grandson in the fourth. Shannon’s homework this weekend was to draw and color an “elemental chart of candy”. It scares me.
I remember discussing Shannon’s schoolwork with my son when she was in fourth grade, just before the uproar over Common Core became public. Jesse complained that the kids weren’t being taught to think and reason (one of the main objectives of education), but merely to get good scores on tests. Where we lived previously, in a fairly solid conservative-leaning county in Northern California, you heard a lot of bragging and self-congratulatory remarks about what great schools we had, what good test scores the kids achieved. What you never heard was that the drop-out rate hovered around 50%. Which is a better predictor of how successful our public education system is? It’s the drop-out rate, not the test scores.
I have for a long time believed that our school systems are nothing more than brainwashing laboratories to indoctrinate our children into the proletariat. We are told endlessly that what we need are workers, workers, workers, not thinkers, thinkers, thinkers. Thinkers are dangerous to the status quo, and better our children never learn to think for themselves. It might cause upset.
I was actually relieved to find that Texas, where we are now, did not adopt the Common Core standards, until someone told me Texas’s were just as bad. I fear ’tis true! Here are some actual problems from Shannon’s recent sixth-grade math homework.
Before I give you the first example, I think I should give you the definition of the word “evaluate”: form an idea of the amount, number, or value of; assess: ‘when you evaluate any hammer, look for precision machining’,or ‘computer simulations evaluated how the aircraft would perform’. In mathematics: find a numerical expression or equivalent for (an equation, formula, or function).
◦ And now, ta-da! our first example: Evaluate a + b= using these values: a = -7, b = 12, c = -11, d = 4, e = -20
How is this to be solved? To evaluate something presupposes an object or proposition to assess the value of. This example leaves off any direction as to what specifically an evaluation should relate to. There’s no logical answer because there’s no logical statement of the problem. And mathematics, above all, is the study of logic.
◦ Here’s another: -9 -17 =
Is it addition? Is it subtraction? Is it negative 9 minus 17? Is it negative 9 negative 17? Is it whatever you want it to be?
◦ Yet another: Michelle is fishing on the lake. She is on a dock that is 9 feet above the surface of the water. She casts her fishing line over the edge of the dock and it goes down 7 feet. Using color counters draw a model of your answer. Is she able to go fishing if her fishing line stops at 7 feet?
Why complicate the problem by directing the child to “use color counters to draw a model of your answer”? What does that add to the solution of the problem? On the one hand, the child is distracted by the direction to “draw a model”, and on the other hand, the problem is ridiculously simplistic for a sixth-grader. Of course she can’t fish if her line is 2 feet short.
◦ And, finally: A football team gains 13 yards on one play, then loses 9 yards on the next. Using + / – counters, draw a model of your answer.
What? It’s like math for five-year olds. Why not just ask have they achieved a total gain or loss, and by how many yards?
We sent men to the moon, and presided over the greatest technological advances in history with good old-fashioned mathematics. As these new ideas and “improvements” are incorporated into our educational system our children are increasingly dumbed-down and unable to meet even basic competency requirements for life as it’s lived in the real world. The Common Core and all these other standards are nothing more than a plummet to the bottom, preparation not for the thinkers who move the world forward, but for the worker bees who slave to keep it in stasis.
It’s no wonder that Louis C.K. said Common Core math made his kids cry. I feel the same way.