As I read Ms. Mariner's blog about fractions, and Americans not knowing the correct sizes of fractions, I was not surprised. Although I cannot recall a specific time when I have encountered this misconception of fractions, I totally believe that it is a real issue. Sometimes we Americans, admittedly myself as well, are just plain dumb, but who's to blame? Math teachers? Students?
The Common Core is quite frankly something that annoys me, a lot. Ms. Mariner commented on how her and other independent school math teachers don't go through any sort of training. I think that this is WAY better than them going through training. If we wanted all of our math teachers to be exactly the same, we would be taught by robots, but robots would not be effective!!! By them not going through training, they are able to teach math in a way that makes sense to each individual student. I think that's our country's education problem. We want everyone to be the same! Well America, BUMMER DEAL. We're not all the same, and our learning needs are not either, so suck it up and teach our students the way they need to be taught.
As far as the A&W/McDonald's issue mentioned in "Why Do Americans Stink at Math?" I think that it is a direct result of American's not understanding what they're learning. Sure, they memorized that 4 is bigger than 3 when they learned how to count to 10 in kindergarten, but did they ever understand what fractions meant? It was all memorization, so when they went to apply it in the real world, making purchasing decisions, they didn't get it. Pure memorization of simple concepts allows absolutely no room for understanding and application of slightly more complex concepts.
This is just a little bit of evidence for why Common Core won't work. We are not robots, our teachers are not robots, and we should not act as if we are. We are individuals, with different skills, and different ways of discovering things. We must cater to that if we truly want to understand and apply learned skills to our lives.
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