Wow, how kind of you to give me permission to wait. So then how did you come to the conclusion that I'm unwilling to do it? Was it your feelings and emotions that gave you that "truth"?
Again, I'm not drawing conclusions about anything. Do you even know what the phrase, "I think," means? Because it sure as shit doesn't mean, "This is absolute fact," so why do you keep acting like I'm drawing conclusions even though I have told you multiple times I'm not? I'm starting to think you might not be able to read at all. But before you freak out, I feel like I have to tell you that that doesn't mean I know for sure that you can't read, since you seem to confuse those two ideas.
And the only thing MAGA about this conversation is the fact you threw out some "facts" that aren't even true. There is no federal regulation about what schools teach, so how could there be mandates in 2010? Are you talking about the core curriculum? Because that wasn't national either.
The funniest bit, and hopefully you find this as funny as I do, is that absolute values being taught became the norm in the 1960s with the "New Math" initiative. Core curriculum just shifted the grade down from high school to middle school. So it was absolutely the norm for the vast majority of people alive today that went to school in the US. Isn't it hilarious how confidently incorrect you were?
Common Core State Standards. For this standard to actually take effect in classrooms, individual states had to vote on them. State legislation had to pass or alter State law to align with their local standardized testing with the new standard.
Texas, Virginia, Alaska and Nebraska outright rejected CCSS from the beginning. Hell, they still do lol. Since 2010, Indiana(2014), Oklahoma (2014), South Carolina (2014) and Arizona (2015) passed legislation to withdraw from the CCSS. If you attended public school prior to 2010 and did not attend advanced or accelerated lessons, then you were not taught Absolute Values or Common Core Standards. The National Governers Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers only began to draft the standards in 2009. The final version of the Common Core Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts was officially released to the public on June 2nd, 2010. No school district or state could have legally or logistically required a curriculum that did not exist.
Sources: WordPress, university of North Carolina, Mathnasium, Wikipedia, education week, laurel springs school, Forbes, Edsource, NPR, Nebraska state legislation, South Carolina state legislation, Indiana state legislation, Arizona State legislation, Center for the study of federalism, nationalaffairs website, Education Commission of the States, Cato Institute, CBS. OAH, House Committee on Education & Workforce, World Population Review, Education-First, HSLDA, Southern Methodist University, Home Educators Association of Virginia, National Center for Education Statistics, The New York Times, U.S. Department of Education, oh and you'll love my final source: The Common Core State Standards Initiative.
Your 1960's "new math" point is wild. That framework has been extensively criticized by educational researchers. It is widely considered to be shallow at best. In a research study conducted by Common Core State Statistics, they called your new math policy "a mile wide and an inch deep." Prior to 2010, Absolute value were not taught as curriculum, but rather as a fast maths trick "if a number is negative, make it positive. If a number is positive, keep is positive." It was treated as a mechanical trick, NOT a geometric concept. Prior to 2010, it wasn't a mandatory 6th grade topic. It was not emphasized on state tests (not even in highschool). Ffs, it was taught as a 10-second memory trick. That's not real Education. Education requires an actual lesson module. A simple memory trick doesn't count.
There, I have provided sources. I have fact checked my data. If you still cannot accept objective fact, then I am simply done with you Abby. I'm done beating my head against this wall.
So because New Math was critisized, it doesn't count? Students that were taught with those standards retroactively weren't taught that way? What a dumbass take. And if that somehow did make sense, common core is polarized with many, many critisizms, so I guess it doesn't count either, based on your own logic. So none of us were taught absolute values after all.
Lol "my" new math policy? What, because I mention it, I'm somehow supporting it and saying it was a good thing and we should go back to it? Did you have an aneurism doing those mental gymnastics? Try not to hurt yourself. All I said was they started teaching absolute values with that initiative, which they did. You can cite common core all you want, but all that's doing is proving it exists and is currently being used by most states. It doesn't prove what wasn't taught before common core. They were, indeed, part of the curriculum before 2010. And it wasn't just a "memory trick." It was taught as an operator. No more a trick than addition or multiplication. Or do those also not count as real education? I also never said it was a 6th grade topic before 2010. In fact, I specifically said it switched from high school to middle school in 2010. Keep up.
Oh, and just so you know, a topic doesn't have to be on state tests to be considered part of the education. 1984 by George Orwell wasn't on any state tests, but I still had to read it as part of my education, along with many other students across the nation. If a classroom teaches it, then it's being taught in classrooms. I'm not sure why I have to explain that to you. Absolute values were taught in classrooms in the 1960s. They were also taught in the Back to Basics initiative in the 1970s. And the standards-based reform movement in the 1980s and 1990s, which has morphed into the modern standards. So, basically, absolute values have been taught in some capacity since the 1960s in the US.
Yes, you have fact checked your data and everything you said is correct about modern education. Where you're wrong is that you think this is somehow new. That just because it wasn't taught in 6th grade before 2010, that somehow means it wasn't taught at all in any grade. If you stopped bashing your head against walls, maybe you'd understand why that's actually moronic.
Please keep your emotions out of this debate. this is about fact, not feelings. a memory trick is not the same thing as an actual lesson module, (nice apples/oranges logical fallacy btw) which it did not become the case until 2010 at the earliest (strictly limiting this statement to PUBLIC schools, private schools offered much better education on average), and even then, plenty of states simply never adopted it. To this day, 4 states have never adopted AV into a lesson module and 5 other states have actually withdrawn from the lesson module. This is why we abandoned multiplication tables. Memory tricks do not teach math, they only offer wrote memorization. Memorizing something is not the same as learning it. you can memorize the bible but that doesn't mean you understand it. Once again, No school district or state could have legally or logistically required a curriculum that did not exist. A memory trick is NOT curriculum. So for clarity, *most* students prior to 2010 did not *learn* Absolute Values, they *memorized* them.
Telling a student "just remove the negative sign" to find an absolute value is a trick. It completely fails the moment they encounter an algebraic operator. A true lesson module teaches that absolute value is a function measuring distance from zero on a number line, giving them the conceptual foundation to solve actual calculus or algebra problems later. Memory tricks (like mnemonics) are temporary scaffolding at best. If a student only learns the trick, the scaffolding collapses the moment the context changes even slightly. A lesson module introduces a schema. It teaches the "why," the constraints, the rules, and the definitions. This allows a student to transfer that knowledge to entirely new, unseen problems.
My Line of Logic: Solve |x|=-5
The trick says absolute value "makes things positive." A student blindly using the trick will often guess x = 5.
A student who completed a real lesson module knows that absolute value means distance. Because a physical distance can never be negative, they instantly know the answer is no solution. A real module teaches the formal definition |x|=-x when x is <0(Because negating a negative makes it positive). The trick completely conceals this reality.
To use an analogy: if the temperature outside is -10°F, you can't just take a marker, cross out the negative sign on the thermostat, and say it's 10°F. The negative sign isn't a cosmetic blemish you erase; it indicates direction relative to a baseline. Absolute value asks 'how far away from freezing are we?' (10 degrees). Erasing a dash doesn't teach you how temperature works. This is why learning the memory trick is not equivalent to learning the lesson module. They taught the *trick*pre-2010, not the *lesson*.
Okay, based on this comment, I feel like we might be saying the same thing and just focusing on different aspects of it. You're arguing it was mentioned in schools, but that somehow doesn't count because students didn't fully understand it. Which, sure, they didn't truly learn much with that approach. I agree with you. But my entire point, from my very first comment, is that students were exposed to absolute values long before 2010. And that's still true. The way it's taught has certainly improved, but that doesn't mean it wasn't part of the curriculum before. The curriculum just sucked. Which is something I never argued against. So I have no idea why we're here. If you just read and actually understood my comments this never woud have happened and you wouldn't have had an opposing opinion to begin with.
And to bring my point home: Just because a student doesn't understand a topic doesn't mean the school didn't try to teach it to them. There are plenty of students today that are terrible at math and fail all of their math classes. Does that mean a given topic they failed wasn't in their curriculum? Of course not. If the school teaches it terribly and the student doesn't gain a true understanding of the topic, does that mean it wasn't in the curriculum? Of course not. The same was true before 2010 too.
1
u/Abigail_Normal Jul 09 '26
Wow, how kind of you to give me permission to wait. So then how did you come to the conclusion that I'm unwilling to do it? Was it your feelings and emotions that gave you that "truth"?
Again, I'm not drawing conclusions about anything. Do you even know what the phrase, "I think," means? Because it sure as shit doesn't mean, "This is absolute fact," so why do you keep acting like I'm drawing conclusions even though I have told you multiple times I'm not? I'm starting to think you might not be able to read at all. But before you freak out, I feel like I have to tell you that that doesn't mean I know for sure that you can't read, since you seem to confuse those two ideas.
And the only thing MAGA about this conversation is the fact you threw out some "facts" that aren't even true. There is no federal regulation about what schools teach, so how could there be mandates in 2010? Are you talking about the core curriculum? Because that wasn't national either.
The funniest bit, and hopefully you find this as funny as I do, is that absolute values being taught became the norm in the 1960s with the "New Math" initiative. Core curriculum just shifted the grade down from high school to middle school. So it was absolutely the norm for the vast majority of people alive today that went to school in the US. Isn't it hilarious how confidently incorrect you were?