Pull Your Hair Out As You Learn the Common Core Way of Doing 6 + 10

Parents in New York are having trouble helping their kids with
math homework now that the curriculum is aligned to the national
Common Core standards, so a local news channel has
released some videos explaining the new lessons.

Ready to pull your hair out? Here’s the fancy pants new way of
figuring out 9 + 6.

Instead of just, well, adding 9 and 6, students must
run a gauntlet of extra addition, “decomposing” 6 into 1 and 5,
“anchoring” 9 to 1 to make 10, and then adding the leftover 5. The
new way requires a lot more time, a higher vocabulary, and more
work. But it’s somehow supposed to be “more comfortable” for young
learners, in the estimation of standards peddlers.

How parents must long for the good old days of rote
memorization! (Incidentally, a
recent Stanford University study found that rote memorization
is important for developing brains.)

The videos also illustrate why adapting to Core-aligned
curriculum is a difficult—and expensive—process for schools. New
instructional materials must be purchased, teachers retrained,
tests rewritten, etc.

Read more from Reason on Common Core
here.

Hat tip: Eric Owen / The Daily Caller