LITMIR.BIZ

      Instead of proceeding to add these numbers in the traditional way, beginning with the right-hand column, the girl counts up the tens from the left column and takes out eight ten-sticks. She does the same for the ones column using the little cubes, and then counts up all the manipulatives. On her paper she writes “86.” She has counted the one-cubes incorrectly. But she doesn’t know it yet, so she plays with the remaining foam blocks until Latdrik tells the children to put away the manipulatives and discuss their answers. It has taken the group approximately eight minutes to work this problem. To answer it the traditional way would take an average first grader about fifteen seconds.

      On the wall are two posters suggesting different ways to add and subtract. They include tally marks, drawing a picture, a number line, and a number sentence: 7 +4 =11. What’s missing is the standard algorithms for addition and subtraction: stacking the numbers and computing them by columns, starting with the ones column. Common Core doesn’t call for this procedure until the fourth grade. For first graders, it prescribes exactly what Latdrik has done: using “a variety of models, including discrete objects and length-based models (e.g., cubes connected to form lengths,) to model add-to, take-from, put-together, take-apart”; teaching children to compare “a variety of solution strategies”; and the like.¹⁰

      Activities like those practiced in Sarah Latdrik’s class have appeared in stories about Common Core’s “new way of school” in newspapers across the country. These methods have actually been around for decades, variously dubbed “new math,” “reform math,” and even “fuzzy math.” As critics point out, multiplying the things that children must keep track of leads to simple errors like those made by the two girls trying to add up two-digit numbers with a detour through sticks and cubes. Moreover, the amount of time eaten up by such convoluted methods means less time for calculating practice. Children are then hampered when they reach algebra, where success requires having routine math procedures down cold.

      Most high-achieving countries call for fluency in three-digit addition and subtraction in third grade, says Ze’ev Wurman, a former U.S. Department of Education official who helped write California’s well-regarded math standards. Those countries also typically introduce standard algorithms immediately, the way many of today’s parents learned math. In Wurman’s view, “The rubbish that fills [Common Core] in earlier grades about ‘strategies’ ‘relationships’ and ‘properties’ . . . is not truly ‘rubbish’ — and one can find some good explanation for a little bit of need of them — but it is repeated ad nauseam.” Thus the curriculum “opens itself up for easy interpretation of fuzz and invented algorithms, which most implementations and textbooks gleefully (or ignorantly) proceed to make.”

      Parents have raised many complaints about the time-devouring Common Core math processes and the incomprehensible problems their young children are assigned. Many examples of confusing math homework have gone viral.

      Jeff Sevart, an electrical engineer who lives in Indiana, posted his second-grade son’s Common Core math homework on Facebook. The instruction for the assignment read: “Jack used the number line below to solve 427 –326. Find his error. Then write a letter to Jack telling him what he did right, and what he should do to fix his mistake.” After spending two hours trying to help his son figure out the answer, Sevart himself wrote the letter:

      Dear Jack,

      Don’t feel bad. I have a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electronics Engineering which included extensive study in differential equations and other higher math applications. Even I cannot explain the Common Core Mathematics approach, nor get the answer correct. In the real world, simplification is valued over complication.

      Sevart then demonstrated the traditional, straightforward method of subtraction. “The answer is solved in under 5 seconds,” he wrote, whereas the process that “Jack” used was “ridiculous and would result in termination” in the workplace. He signed his letter “Frustrated Parent” and put it online. Sevart’s outraged post soon appeared on Yahoo! News, Glenn Beck’s radio program, the Huffington Post, and Time online, among other media outlets.