I don't have an issue with trying to teach kids multiple ways to learn the same thing, but I work for an after school program and help a lot of kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders with their homework. Now, I learned times tables with the drill-it-into-your-head approach. There was a poster with ten rows and ten columns and went from 1 to 100. We were told to practice and had games to play to make our calculations faster, some kids were better than others, nbd, they were still valued as classmates and were good at other things.

The way they teach the kids now is by trying to incorporate visual learning, and honestly when I look at it, it seems like a nice idea, but then in the practice of it (at least with the kids I help) it's so counterintuitive that it keeps the child from wanting to do their homework because doing it the way the state/nation wants it requires that they show their work.

So for instance, if I'm trying to teach a child about multiplication and I'm showing them 3x8, I might show them eight rows of three circles (or apples or baskets, or whatever the hell is appropriate to the worksheet). Then the worksheet flips it around to 8x3 and now they have the children draw three rows of eight circles. Then the kid is supposed to count the circles both ways, and Holy fucking shit, it's 24 no matter which way you do it… THEN they have the kid rotate the paper so that they see the three rows of eight circles looks identical to eight rows of three if you just rotate the paper.

Now bear in mind that this illustrative way of explaining the patterns of multiplication requires instructions that requires new phraseology, and therein lies the problem (at least as far as I see). So the instructions say to make a "matrix" or a "number plane" or some bullshit like that (a word that a 1st grader really isn't going to understand in the first place) of 3 groups of 8. Now, count the circles and write down that number. Now fill in the blank: _ x _ = _. Then the worksheet asks you to do the same thing for the opposite. Then for the second one it adds the bit about turning the page to see that the two shapes actually match, it's just one Matrix is turned on it's side.

I just remembered back to that times table with the ten rows and the ten columns and you could do the math visually that way 4 down meets 8 across is 32… holy shit, same thing happens when I go 8 down and it meets 4 across! No tricky phrasing there, just a chart with numbers on it. Worked great and could be used for visual learners and traditional learners alike.

Anyway, have you ever tried to explain something really simple to someone? Like something that, if you break it down, there's almost no words to do so… or something that if you really wanted to break it down you'd have to get into fucking physics or metaphysics? Like try explaining to yourself what "yes" means in a way that's simpler that just going "It fucking means yes". You can't, if you have to explain it, you're going to rely on stuff that's more complex than just the word "yes". "It's an affirmative response that might indicate a willingness to do something, an agreement that you may do something, a desire for something, a confirmation of something."

The words "yes" or "no" seem so simple at their cores, but trying to explain them in their entirety is a huge pain in the ass. We take for granted that we learned what "yes" or "no" means from our first days. Our mothers or fathers would say, "no" when we grabbed something we shouldn't grab, and we might associate that sound with a particular object before we even learn that "no" in this particular case means "don't touch that". Then we get hurt and begin to learn that "no" is sometimes meant to protect us, but other times it just seems to mean that I don't get any ice-cream. There are countless times your parents said "yes" and "no" to you, all of which shaped your understanding of those words, but again, to explain what they fully mean to someone is really hard. And we haven't even gotten to what "no" means when a woman says it (please don't harass me, I don't condone rape). And yet "yes" and "no" seem so simple.

Well, so do times tables and adding. But those are even simpler in many regards as there are no nuanced ways to look at 2x2. There's no way to interpret the answer as "4 but only if you eat your vegetables." It's just fucking 4. Yet some of the Common Core strategies I've seen over-complicate it to the point that, even if it's helping some kids who are marginally marginalized by the archaic, pre-common-core standards of teaching, it's alienating some children even further.

One of the girls who I help with homework has some sensory processing issues, she can easily add single digit numbers, most two digit numbers, etc. But then the teachers teach her a strategy where you have to not just borrow from the tens column to subtract, but you have to draw sticks to represent the Tens and dots to represent the Ones… and you have to cross off a Tens-stick to draw ten Ones-dots over here , blah blah blah. She get's confused and angry and scared. Not because the math is hard, but the procedure used to teach the math is much more prone to human error. "It's not 23, but you're close, kiddo!" I'll say. Where she went wrong was somewhere in the crossing off of a Tens-stick, turning it into ten Ones-dots and then moving those over to the Ones-group. How she got confused there, all never know…. oh wait, it's convoluted.

Anyway, in her mind she's thinking "Fuck!!! That took me like 5 minutes and now I have to start all over! I'm NEVER going to get this done!" because there are so many parts to solving this once simple problem now, that going back over every step becomes just as time consuming as starting over from the beginning. Now, not everyone has a sensory issue like this girl, but other kids I've helped have had similar difficulty and been similarly frustrated. Clearly, my survey is pretty limited, I only teach a handful of kids and don't know what the numbers say across the country. Perhaps it's much more effective than I know, but these are my observations and thoughts.

I appreciate that there is great value to some of the ideas of the common core. There is something awesome about building a cohesive lesson plan that ties what you're learning in science to what you're learning about in social studies and English (although I don't think it would have worked have worked well for me and maybe alienated me further from school). I've seen it in action and it seemed okay. But Math seems to be the odd ball out in this Common Core experiment.

There are mechanisms in math that seem to me to be so basic that a better explanation doesn't exist than what we have. We can show the kids a group of three marbles and a group of two marbles, then we can put them together and compare that to an already existing group of five marbles… and things start clicking, faster for some than others, but they start clicking. Then you can show it on paper with numerals, little pictorial representations, or with measuring implements, etc etc. You can do all of that, but to break the most basic functions of math down into something "easier" for kids to grasp is a fool's errand. I read the instructions for these strategies, I've been immersed in this method for multiplication for a while now, and I've seen other methods, that I liked better

I'm not as familiar with Common Core math as it appears to older students, but I've no doubt that there are great new ways to teach that, but from what I've seen, this is a hug failure of Common Core. Now I wouldn't dismiss Common Core for that alone, and that is all I'm really able to speak on, but I think that the basics of Math are about as simple and explainable as they're ever going to get.