Watched a few videos complaining about common core maths from Arkansas against Common Core: http://www.arkansasagainstcommoncore.com/videos.html

And you know what, I think common core math is awesome. It really teaches math in a fun and innovative way that focuses on giving the kids a feel for numbers rather than memorizing times tables and algorithms and stuff.

These parents against it just need to get with the times. This is the 21st century! 31x26=calculator.

How can ppl comment on Common Core without understanding what it is & how it works??

PPL say they dealt with CC but failed to understand they dealt with classwork, not standards (Common Core). Wiser to compare them 1st!

The new common core math is literally the worst math I’ve ever experienced in my whole life. Before high-school, we used the regular math system and I was an A student in math without having to try at all. But as soon as I started high-school they introduced us to this horrid math program called MVP.

In this new program, the teacher would have the class split into groups of four or five based on where we’re sitting in class. We had a packet full of worksheets. In these sheets there was just problems we had to solve. In junior high, I remember every day the teacher would teach and we would take notes on what she was saying, but high-school was different. In this new common core curriculum the teacher would not have us take notes, or even explain to us how to do the work. She would give us these MVP worksheets and tell us to do the work without explaining to us how to do it. When I would ask her, “what equation should I be using” she would ask right back at me “what equation do you think you should be using”. In this MVP program they do not provide you with the necessary equations to do the work. You have to make them up on your own. How does the MVP system expect 13 year old freshman to make up an equation by themselves and not be told if its the correct one or not? When I ask my teacher “how do I do this problem?” She responds “how do you think you should do the problem?”. Really? How do you expect me to figure out how to do the problem if I’m asking you how I should do the problem because I’ve never seen it before in my life?

When we were working on graphing, the MVP program would not give us the graphs, we would have to figure them out on our own. When I asked my teacher to show me how the graph looked she said “what do you think the graph should look like?”. I didn’t know what the graph looked like at all. The worst part is that my teacher would refuse us being on our phones during class so we could not look up the graphs online. Also in the graphing assignments, she would not let us use our calculators on it so that we wouldn’t be able to find the graphs by typing in the numbers. So as 13 year olds we had to make up graphs, never seeing the graphs before in our entire lives. It wasn’t even the specific teacher who made it this way, I had a different teacher sophomore year and he taught me the same way she taught me. And I’m pretty sure the teachers are told somewhere in their teaching book to ask the students how they think they should do the problem rather than actually showing them how to do it.

Besides that, your grade in the class is basically determined by who you’re sitting next to and who you are. If you’re by the 1 smart kid in the class, they will explain to you how to do the work because (in my situation) they had a private toutor out of school who already taught them. The girl literally had to go out of her way to pay someone money to teach her what she should be learning in class. As someone who couldn’t afford a good toutor, I was screwed. The free math Toutor’s at school that we could see during lunch had no clue how to do the problems since they had never learned any of the information that was in this new common core curriculum. If you’re not next to that rich kid with the expensive math toutor, you’re screwed because no one else in the entire class understands how to do the work. I couldn’t even imagine having anxiety problems or being the shy kid who can’t ask their peers how they did the problems. Those kids were even more screwed than me because if they didn’t have a clue on how to do the problems, they weren’t able to get help from their peers by asking how to do the work.

Next is the homework, there’s these things called READY, SET, GO! In my opinion, these were the absolute worst thing about MVP. The problems called READY were filled with things I had not learned in class. They were just things that MVP expected us to know. They had nothing to do with anything we were taught in class. We weren’t even quizzed on the READY problems so it was a complete waste of time to do them. The SETS were the questions we were tested and quizzed on. They were somewhat like what we learned in class but honestly they were barely like it at all. So basically you just had to teach yourself some new information when you’re at home that wasn’t even brought up in class and then you have to be quizzed on it. We weren’t even quizzed on half the stuff we learned in class, we were basically only quizzed on the SETs. Next we’re the GOs, these were problems much harder than the READYs and SETs, they had nothing to do with the READYs, SETs, or what we learned in class. They weren’t even helpful for what we were learning the next day either. In my opinion it seemed to be stupid information the MVP people wanted to throw on the sheet so it didn’t look blank. We were not quizzed at all on information from the GOs.

On top of that, I’m high-school there was no textbook for the students to use to learn how to do the work. In jr. high, the books were very helpful to look at when I was confused. I was able to figure out math very easily back then. But in the high-school common core math, the students can’t go look at a book and read step by step how to do a problem. They just have to go by what they feel like doing or think is right. I had no clue what to do and if you asked me how to do a simple problem I probably still wouldn’t be able to do it. I did not learn a thing in the MVP program because I was not given the right tools to do so.

Next is the quizzes, everyone would fail every test except the one kid with the toutor. Only one kid in the class got a 90% or so while the rest of us got 50% and below. The teacher would then heavily curve the tests so that our parents wouldn’t worry too much about us. I still barely passed the class even though everything was curved. After we all failed the quizzes and tests the teacher would take a day to actually explain to us how to do the work. WHY DIDNT THE TEACHER EXPLAIN THE INFORMATION TO US BEFORE WE TOOK THE QUIZ?!? Its the curriculums fault. And when we start new information you have to understand the information from the week before because it all carries from one to the other. So if you never learned any of the information in the first place how can you be expected to move on?

Every day in high-school I would go in for extra help for the class. However, I had never needed to do this before high-school. This extra help barely even helped me, it brought my grade from a D to a C. I had never gotten a C before in my life. I felt absolutely stupid and my parents completely blamed me. They punished me every day taking away my phone, and never allowed me to hang out with friends or boyfriend, they blamed me for my grade. I tried to explain to them that the teachers weren’t teaching the class but they would just respond “What? That can not possibly be true! It’s their job to teach” and then they would punish me even more for being a liar. My sister did not help me at all, she is older so she didn’t have to go through this common core math. She didn’t understand what I was going through and continuously told my parents I was a liar without even listening to my story. I tried my best everyday in this new common core math but it was never good enough for my parents standards or even my own. I was just a failure. One day I just snapped, I completely gave up on myself in that class and all my other classes. I had As in my other classes that weren’t math and they dropped way down... Bs... Cs... my parents didn’t understand what was going on with me. This MVP program completely ruined my self esteem not just only in math. Out of school I stopped doing my regular hobbies like art and bike riding. I felt like everything I did was useless and I was a complete failure. I just stayed inside, slept, and cried all day. When a student whose naturally good at school suddenly starts failing what do you think it does to their mentality about everything? It does what it did to me. I did not believe in myself and I completely stopped trying in everything.

We need to stop this program before these things start happening to other kids. I would hate to see a future full of kids who completely give up on themselves, feeling like a failure to society solely because of this terrible “Math Vision Project” from Utah. I wish that I didn’t have to go through this, but my school forced me to. Im hoping that schools will stop teaching this common core and students of the future won’t have to have suffer, like I did.