Video surfaced recently of a Illinois school official explaining that under the new Common Core standards, students can get simple arithmetic wrong and still receive credit.
“How about this one: In school, three times four equals eleven,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “This is new Common Core curriculum. It is not a wrong answer. Three times four does equal eleven... if you know how you arrived at that answer.”
OFFICIAL: But even under the new Common Core, even if they said three times four was eleven, if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really in words and in oral explanation and they showed it in the picture but they just got the final number wrong, we're really more focusing on the "how."
TEACHER: You're going to be correcting them, right?
OFFICIAL: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
According to TheBlaze, however, this particular clip, which gained a good deal of media attention, does not tell the full story:
Recent comments by an Illinois school district official seem to suggest it doesn’t matter if students get simple arithmetic wrong under new Common Core standards, but those remarks highlighted in some news reports don’t give the full context.
Several news outlets have seized on remarks made last month by Grayslake, Ill. Community Consolidated School District 46 curriculum coordinator Amanda August in which she said it matters less if students answer 3 x 4 incorrectly as long as they can explain how they arrived at their final answer.
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A fuller video of the forum, however, reveals that August said first students should certainly know that 3 x 4 equals 12.
In the longer video, the school official explains:
“They are supposed to not only be able to come up with the same answer no matter how they do it but they’re going to have to show, OK I know 3 x 4 numerically is 12, but I can show this in a picture, I can write a real world situation where I show that if I put four apples into three bags that’s going to give me 12 total apples. So they’re going to have to be able to go back and forth between all those different modalities and really show that."
Watch the full video HERE.
The conversation is less about whether or not children will receive credit for wrong answers, and more about what the Common Core standards will mean for education.
“Apparently, that's inherent through the entire math program in Common Core. And, you know, they are rewriting history, they're doing this with math,” Pat said. “They've changed the algorithms, too, of the way you arrive at problems and so parents have no idea how to teach this new thing because they've gone in a completely new direction to get to the answer.”
“We're also not teaching cursive writing because we don't need that anymore. So you're not teaching cursive writing, which means it will be like hieroglyphics. You want to read your parents' or your grandparents' diaries or their words? You want to read the Constitution? It's hieroglyphics. You don't even know what it says,” Glenn said. “But we're also not teaching typing anymore. It's hunt‑and‑peck. Hunt‑and‑peck… I'm telling you, electric shocks, it's time. It's time. You just don't make any sense at all.”
