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Jackson Taus posted:One of the things that aways annoys me in discussions of Common Core are parents who are somehow engaged enough to throw a fit that their children's curriculum is different from what they learned 30 years ago, but not engaged enough to take 10-15 minutes and figure it out. Like they always circulate these examples where it's like "oh God this is so ridiculous how are our kids supposed to understand this New Math" but the examples make plenty of sense if you look at them for a minute to two, much less if you go over with the kid what the teacher said in class or look at the textbook or online resources or whatever. I was a tutor and worked with a lot of tutors, and we all had some difficulty understanding Common Core. We knew the math, obviously, and could very easily teach students how to properly solve problems, but some of the examples and methods used were completely out of left field for us, and given that we were getting second or thirdhand knowledge of what was being taught through a student who didn't properly comprehend the lesson (after all, they're in tutoring because they don't get the concept), it was fairly difficult to get quickly. For the most part, we'd just grab a different textbook and give students example problems from there. My biggest complaint with the common core book we worked with most often is that instead of breaking down example problems by concept like a traditional math book, the examples problems were all mixed review, so if a student understood concepts X and Z, then it was a nightmare to try to find examples for Y that they missed.
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Sep 5, 2014 09:25
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Zesty Mordant posted:I think a lot of us have had that revelation, maybe within math itself. I was taught in the tradition of Old Math, or basically the "do this, move this number here, and do this," method. Sometimes realizing why you do something, like "borrowing" during subtraction, makes sense, is really surprising, because math was not about the why when I was a kid. This extends a lot further than math too; I recall being really confused by stoichiometry in chemistry, wondering why "you take this element and multiply it by this mole and multiply it by the other mole" or whatever worked, until I realized it's just conversions basically, despite it not being explained as such. If Common Core does make emphasis on averting this, then I'm for it. Huh, I was taught under the old system and always understood why to do things like that. I always taught those concepts to my students and classmates whenever they needed help as well; I think your example with stoichiometry is apt - I've never had a student fail to understand stoichiometry after I explained the underlying concepts and forced them to set a seven or eight step stoichiometry themselves (not necessarily just chemistry, but dates/times/etc. as well).
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Sep 7, 2014 06:28
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Trent posted:I'm back to working retail while I work on my masters, and I see this all the time. Trying to explain to someone that even though (for example) ink cartridge A costs 40% more than B, B has 60% more ink, so it's actually cheaper per unit volume... It's a lost cause with a depressing number of people. That's horrifying. At least at grocery stores they do the money/unit food conversion for you, but I can't even conceive of people who don't do that calculation. It's the first thing that both my mother and my father independently taught me about shopping and looking for deals. Granted, there are some times where it's beneficial to go with the "worse" deal, such as when you don't need the extra stuff, or the extra stuff will spoil, but that's on a case by case basis.
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Sep 7, 2014 18:34
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Renaissance Robot posted:Is there an actual reason why American supermarkets continue to defy progress by displaying neither 100g/1kg normalised prices nor price after tax on shelf labels? Very rarely do I run into an issue where two competing brands of the same good have different units in their price/unit displayed on the tag. As for the tax thing, computer parts is right; we don't generally mention the after-tax/recycling fee/whatever cost of goods.
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Sep 7, 2014 22:38
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