Intrinsically Interesting CCMS

At last, I've found an organization that believes mathematics education has to be something other than rigorous, precise, challenging and boring. Hats off to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction who believes that math should be not only "intrinsically interesting" but should also involve "collaboration, discourse and reflection" and be "meaningful and engaging". The image from their website even shows students smiling, engaged and clearly collaborating as they, presumably, explore meaningful math activities on their computers.

I came upon this refreshing web-site by "Googling" Common Core Math Standards Resources, a search that yielded 2,640,000 relevant hits in 29 seconds. When I "Binged" the same phrase I got a staggering 49,900,000 hits. Many of the resources are authored by States (e.g. North Carolina) , Foundations (e.g.The Noyce Foundation)  or professional organizations (e.g. NCTM )  but by far the greatest number are from  commercial organizations (e.g.Office Max)  hoping to cash in on the re-education of the nation's teaching force.

Having clearly only scratched the surface of this vast ocean of resources it is becoming clear that some of the authors really do understand the intent of the writers of the CCMS while others don't. Becoming a connoisseur of such resources is probably as important as constructing a meaningful understanding of what the CCMS are all about.

There are some excellent resources at Ve2,  The Vermont Educational Exchange. The Phoenix Rising article, in particular, by  Hung-Hsi Wu  is a really good read.