Common Core Math Constantly Misinterpreted

The Common Core Maths Standards must be one of the least read and most criticized documents in the history of mankind. There are myriad websites devoted to its downfall and repeal; politicians calling for it's removal and parents posting ill-informed emotional sabotage videos such as this one on the People's Voice FB. The person in the video even uses the term "new math" to connect the Common Core Math Standards with the "New Math" debacle  of the 1970s, something that has been done with great success during the past 50 years to stop progress in math education.

The saddest thing of all is that the person who made this video almost certainly has not read the Common Core Math Standards. If she had done she would have read in the fourth grade Number and Operations in Base Ten standard the following;

        4. Fluently add and subtract multi-digit whole numbers using the standard algorithm. 
             (Grade 4 NBT)

Again, in Grade 5, she would have read

        5. Fluently multiply multi-digit whole numbers using the standard algorithm. 
            (Grade 5, NBT) 

And in grade 6

        2. Fluently divide multi-digit numbers using the standard algorithm.  
           (Grade 6, NS) 

The strategy that she so eloquently illustrates is just a step on the ladder to helping students

understand what the algorithm is all about.The algorithms are so much easier to remember and apply 

in appropriate places when students understand what they are doing. 


It's all here in black and white in the Common Core Standards document. All you have to do is open

the link, read it and try to understand what most of us learned by rote, without any understanding 

when we were in elementary school. The example shown in the video is an exercise a student might

do to develop understanding of the standard algorithm.


ps The picture above is a classic example of the misrepresentation of the Common Core Math 

      Standards.