[thwayunion]

The issue with "Parental rights are supreme" is that there are tons of parents whose demands will make it impossible for your kid to learn much of anything.

In our district, we had to put AP CS on hold because apparently RNGs are too close to gambling and gambling is sinful. You can't even get through the Java standard library without angering the religious right these days.

They threw a huge fit about Common Core Math as well (as a working mathematician -- and one with some amount of passing experience in teaching mathematics at that -- I could never get those parents to articulate what the actual problem was... AFAICT some TV pundit told them to be angry about math).

I wonder if these parents realize that about half of the middle schoolers in Florida not only have seen a penis, but have one of their very own!

BTW, the possibility that this was about inter-personal feuds rather than David just strengthens the point. Giving every parent potential veto power over anything that happens in school is a good way of making sure that nothing will happen in school.

Some teacher makes a valid criticism of your child's classmate during a parent-teacher conference, the parent takes it personally, the spat escalates, the course is derailed. By the time you find out WTF is even happening, your kid is already half a grade level behind in every subject. Rinse and repeat the next school year.

[brobdingnagians]

Have you ever met a kid who was excited about doing math the Common Core way?

One of the issues with Common Core Math is that it really teaches children to jump through the hoops of diagramming the way the book says to do it (and that way is cumbersome), not actually solve problems or understand concepts. People model ideas differently, Common Core requires one overly pedantic way of doing it, for the intelligent who figure out a better underlying representation, the Common Core Math Way(!) is drudgery. That just means more hatred for mathematics. It would be better to show examples and ideas, get interest and excitement, then formalize, but formalize in a way that is useful later on.

Mathematics _is_ exciting, it is a puzzle. Teaching should reflect that.

[thwayunion]

Common Core is just a set of standards. This is a bit like criticizing the API because one specific implementation of the API is garbage; you may be right, or wrong, but what you're criticizing is not relevant to the API design, at least at the first order.

Some publisher's course materials may fit your criticism. Lots of expensive garbage in K12.

The material I reviewed was quite the opposite. Instead of memorizing one way of performing an operation, you learn many different ones, discuss why one might be better than the other in certain contexts, and even think through why two different algorithms implement the same operation. The students I worked with/observed emerged from high school with a level of mathematical maturity that most students don't achieve until well after their university Calculus sequence, if ever.

Two other thoughts:

1. Everything you just described also describes how most schools implemented mathematics education prior to common core. If this is how someone taught with common core, it's almost 100% certain that this is also how they taught before common core, and that this is how they would teach mathematics regardless of what standards they were following. What you are describing is a bad mathematics educator, which is a serious problem in the USA but is orthogonal to choice of standards.

2. Most importantly, I never got even an articulation at this level of detail. People were angry because pundits told them to be angry. There were no articulated reasons. Just, "CC = bad".

[mcphage]

> One of the issues with Common Core Math is that it really teaches children to jump through the hoops of diagramming the way the book says to do it (and that way is cumbersome), not actually solve problems or understand concepts

That's actually the opposite of the Common Core content I've seen at schools—its emphasis is on having a variety of looking at a problem and solving it, based on he situation. Instead of just hammering in the standard algorithms. It's not perfect, but what I've seen, I've liked.

[sharemywin]

I do think parents should be able to review the stuff they're kids are getting thought and probably have the option to opt out. so they're kids can learn about it on youtube the way they're supposed.

[sharemywin]

what then OnlyFans. I think that's pushing it a little.

[sacnoradhq]

The solution is to boot the kids (sorry kids) until their parents come back slightly saner or can afford private schools for flatearthers and creationists.

Education should not be a democracy where the loudest bully parents whine about critical race theory, evolution, or sex ed.

[sharemywin]

Common Core Math - They were upset because they couldn't understand it.

[arthurcolle]

Have these people heard of dice? Or coins? Just wow

[ChainOfFools]

A couple of years ago I attended an introductory course on scheme. about halfway through the second or third lesson one of the students objected on religious grounds to the example presented by the instructor, which simulated some basic statistical operations involving a deck of cards. This guy proceeded to file a complaint with some review board and the course had to be modified to avoid mentioning anything to do with hands or sets of playing cards. Not even games, just groupings of shuffled cards.

But similar examples featuring probabilities of outcomes in a relay race were deemed suitable despite the obvious nerfing of the model required to set the capabilities of all runners to be equal.

[thwayunion]

> dice? Or coins?

The labs were about these things (and cards), and therefore gambling. We had to do purely abstract labs instead. The issue is that probability is hard to teach even with visceral physical examples of sampling from distributions.