Friday, June 13, 2014

Common Core opponents are irrational - and ignorant

Forgive me getting a little overheated about this.

Right now, it's fashionable to trash the Common Core State Standards Initiative - or Common Core, as it's more generally known. However, after having read a lot of anti-CC articles (and comments on articles) on the Web, I have reached an important conclusion. Two conclusions, as a matter of fact.

1. Common Core opponents are irrational.
2. Common Core opponents are ignorant.

To illustrate their irrationality, I will point you once again to "Frustrated Parent." He couldn't figure out his son's math problem, and so he and the entire world blamed it on Common Core. I looked at the math problem in question. It simply presented another way to learn subtraction. As I explained in my posting about it, there are many different ways to teach subtraction.

Common Core does not tell you how to teach subtraction, but it allows for all those different teaching strategies.

To underscore the irrationality, I have been following the comments in another article about CC. One of the commenters was bashing CC because, to quote his words as well as I can from memory, it doesn't allow for the fact that there are many different ways to teach a concept, and it requires that the concept be taught in one way. Um, (a) nothing could be further from the truth; and (b) this directly contradicts the underlying notion behind the math problem that "Frustrated Parent" was bawling about.

As for ignorance, when I say "ignorant" I mean "stubbornly unwilling to learn (more) about a subject." I've read lots of comments by people who are spouting off authoritatively about something they know nothing about, when the truth is freely available, and easy to read, at the Common Core State Standards website. All they have to do is look it up. But they prefer to go on blabbering ignorantly about what they perceive as Common Core and all its shortcomings, unencumbered by facts or the truth.

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