Along with the roadside sunflowers and goldenrod, there’s another yellow object that signals the arrival of fall: the school bus.
What does this dude who never had kids think about when a school bus goes by besides knowing that he can stay up late on school nights? Invariably, I think about Common Core.
Common Core is a new education platform whose objective is finding complicated ways to teach simple concepts. There’s a video making the rounds of a math teacher explaining how nine plus six equals 15.
“Ten is emphasized in our young grades as we are working in a base-10 system,” she says. “If we can partner nine to a number and anchor 10, we can help our students see what nine plus six is. So we are going to decompose our six and we know six is made up of parts. One of its parts is a one and the other is a five …”
She lost me at “partner nine.” What’s wrong with “nine plus six equals 15? Remember that?”
Blame the changing times, but the newfangled ways they’re teaching the young ’uns are hardly new.
The school year bookended by John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Beatlemania included a hydra-headed evil called “New Math” and a math professor named Tom Lehrer. Lehrer earned a doctorate at Harvard and, as a hobby, wrote satirical songs that hold up well 60 years later. One was about New Math; specifically, Base Eight.
In Base Eight, there are no numbers above eight, and instead of 10s, there are one, eight, 64, 512 (64 times eight), and so on. Lost yet?
Professor Lehrer nonetheless stated that solving problems in Base Eight was easy — so simple that only a child could do it. He also said Base Eight was just like Base 10 — if you were missing two fingers.
Fifty years ago, sixth-grade teachers failed to force Base Six into my resisting memory. I developed a hatred for anything math-related.
That’s unfortunate, since it’s not far from Geometry I to the layout of a baseball diamond and from there to the fine points of Greek and Roman architecture.
Don’t get me started on the other subjects. When I think of all the rubbish I learned in English class, it’s a wonder I can write at all.
How many beautiful minds have been lost to Common Core? This is what I wondered as the bus goes by.
Oh, that I’d had kids so that on parent night, I could confront their history teachers. “Young man, I remember when such-and-such happened, the textbook is wrong and my kid doesn’t deserve the C-plus you gave her.”
The other day, a store clerk gave me too much change in return for a small purchase. Maybe he counted in Base Eight. I hope he’s never in the bunker on Doomsday, finger on the button, counting backward. He might forget what comes after “five.”
“U.S. Students Rank 36th in World,” reads a headline. Singapore is kicking our backsides. We’re cooked, right?
Then there’s a story from Colorado. High school students hit the bricks, and their grievances have nothing to do with prom dresses.
Their school boards had proposed changes for history classes that emphasize patriotism while de-emphasizing rebellion and social disorder. They broke out the signs. “We have a right to know history,” one sign read.
“America was founded on civil disobedience, so it’s very bothersome that that wants to be taken out,” one student told a Denver TV station’s reporter.
Good for her. Without rebellion, the band would be playing “God Save The Queen” at this year’s homecoming game. And good for them. Places still exist where the kids are all right.
Tom Sanders is a Times Herald community columnist.
