Avoiding Common Core Math

Most of us who homeschool, and perhaps even more who don’t, are greatly concerned over the emergence of common core math. Our first thought is to bury our head under a blanket or quilt because, we reason, it cannot effect us: we know our children. They are smart, engaging, curious little beings, incorruptable. But in reality what we do now matters very much for the future of our children. We have to educate ourselves and be aware of what material we (or others) put down in front of our kids.

Our first focus, as parents, is one of triage: how do we a corruption of our child’s ability to actually do math?

How do we avoid common core altogether if we homeschool or have our children in private schools, and how do we provide extracurricular support to retrain our children out of the common core math mind” if our kids are in public school.

This is not just “the new math” of our parent’s generation. It is the final (I hope) stage in a longtime dumbing down of math education with the effect of nearly eliminating math competency in most of our adult population. Common core extends far beyond math and is all equally heinous, but today is Math Monday at byebyebrickandmortar.com so I will focus on the math.

I noticed the beginnings of common core thinking in Pearson math materials as far back as 2008. These were evidenced in conceptual methods that were so counter-intuitive that when I questioned the teachers of my children’s school (in my role teaching math to the advanced groups in the classroom) the answers were for me to stay on the teacher book script; the teachers could not understand the concepts either. And so this “pre-common core -esque” math was taught to hundreds and hundreds at my children’s school without explanation and absolutely without comprehension by those children. In my sessions with the advanced children, I ignored those exercises altogether and taught the children how to do the math rather than repeat the incomprehensible conceptual models that I now recognize clearly in the common core framework. After a bit of work, I now understand the conceptual models of common core math well enough to teach them, but they are absolutely cumbersome and will take our children’s generation literally back to pre-civilization math competency levels. Even ancient Egyptians and the Indus peoples could run circles around a common core math graduate. And sadly, I am not exaggerating.

But what can we do to avoid the mess that is common core math? And while we are at it, how do we avoid common core teaching methods that threaten to corrupt the writing, thinking, and learning abilities of our children in all areas of study?

One woman, Tina Hollenbeck, began a project (The Educational Freedom Coalition) which maps and records the alignment of all educational material publishers to common core. This list was compiled after direct contact with each publisher to confirm their position, making it, in my mind, the most reliable resource out there today. “Common Core Project – The Homeschool Resource Roadmap” is an ongoing project. The list today includes 2,163 publishers, with comments about each, and provides a great place for any parent (homeschooling or not) to review and select curriculum. The list was compiled for homeschoolers specifically, but in practice it is useful to anyone with children.