Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Need help with my daughters math.

From what little I can tell in CC math, they want students to be "taught/forced" to do the 'shortcuts' that others have always figured out on our own. For instance, in the above #1, most anyone can guess pretty close to what the actual answer will be, then if the calculated answer is not close to that you know you've done something wrong.

Or, when adding say 210 plus 493. Many people figure out the shortcuts of taking some away from one number to make it easier (subtract 10 from 210 to get 200, add the 10 to 493 to get 503, then tack the 200 back on to that for 703). CC feels compelled to teach all of those 'shortcuts' rather than allowing a student to develop them on their own.

This results in a number of unintended outcomes: students fail to learn computational math without any shortcuts, hence not understanding the precise genius of mathematics at all; the smarter students are no longer compelled to discover 'shortcuts' on their own, hence they lack discovery skills and we all may end up missing something that would have been discovered; and parents no longer understand what is going on in their child's education; hence they look stupid and the govt has to train up a child in the way he should go knowing that when he is old he will not depart from it!