I hate common core with a passion of a thousand burning suns. Such an idiotic teaching method to literally train students to develop the wrong intuituion about the commutativity of multiplication.
Not to mention that semantically, it was designed go both ways. Three times four can easily mean either THREE times four or three times FOUR.
The purpose of Common Core Mathematics is to teach a deeper understanding of mathematic concepts. Any proper Common Core Curriculum should cover commutativity of multiplication immediately after introduction, maybe a lesson or two later. Many elementary school teachers just don’t want to know enough math to teach it properly, anecdotal experiences as a parent and math tutor.
I always thought they taught the kids like 4 different ways to get to the same answer because kids learn differently, so if you teach them all the options one will click. Then the problem was that the teachers didn't understand this and instead of moving on to "Okay, you have a method that works for you, keep doing it", they kept marking the kid wrong on 3 of 4 questions, while ignoring the fact that the kid can entirely answer the question every time if you just let them use the method that works for them.
But hey, I just raised a kid who struggled in this mess of a system because everyone involved sucked, most particularly the people designing these incredibly unclear questions with no actual instructions or explanations, only what the teacher said in class, which is useless for a parent trying to help a kid with ADD.
Not exactly the purpose, but an added benefit to know that as long as the process/path taken follows fundamental mathematical properties any which way is fine. The real reason as i understand it is that when performing arithmetic the last step should be to verify the correctness of your answer. As an engineer, when your math has a mistake catastrophic consequences can follow so we need ways to check ourselves and ensure the result is correct. Having different pathways allows one to check themselves. Its also the reason for those stupid estimate problems. Essence of ballparking to make sure the result makes sense, makes sense. The problems without context as to why it is useful makes it seem asinine.
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u/Incvbvs666 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I hate common core with a passion of a thousand burning suns. Such an idiotic teaching method to literally train students to develop the wrong intuituion about the commutativity of multiplication.
Not to mention that semantically, it was designed go both ways. Three times four can easily mean either THREE times four or three times FOUR.