[HN Gopher] Common Core Sheets
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Common Core Sheets
Author : quyleanh
Score : 46 points
Date : 2023-11-09 09:04 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.commoncoresheets.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.commoncoresheets.com)
| quacked wrote:
| One afternoon during my senior year of college, I was
| procrastinating by trying to estimate the height of the stack of
| every assignment I'd ever completed since kindergarten, and
| suddenly realized that I had produced basically nothing of worth
| during my 16 years of school. Since about 3rd grade I'd _felt_
| busy and productive every school year, because I 'd been
| diligently slogging through mountains of assignments, worksheets,
| problem sets, and essays. However, looking back, if I measured my
| _production_ in terms of items produced that had any lasting
| value (artwork, essays, code that might be used outside of an
| assignment, etc.) I was at fewer than 2-3 "things" per year. If
| I measured my _learnedness_ in terms of what I could actually
| recite out of the hundreds of thousands of things I 'd "learned",
| I could probably only recite 5-6% of it, and most of it was gone.
|
| Other people typically say that all of that slogging was useful,
| and it was "teaching me to think critically" or "giving me
| practice at learning", and even if I don't remember that stuff
| it's still important for me to have looked at it. I tentatively
| agree that it's okay to take a shallow pass at some material
| without really mastering it, because then you have a basis to
| build on later. But I'm not so sure that my time in school was
| well-used, and I have a vague sense that I've reached less than a
| tenth of my intellectual potential. By seventh grade I had
| already optimized my "learning style" to cram hard at the last
| minute, burn assignments down as quickly as possible, and then
| aggressively purge the memories of the knowledge as soon as the
| next "unit" began. Many subjects I now find interesting were
| practically traumatizing in school because of the stress and
| workload. Now that I'm investigating them independently, it's far
| easier to remember facts.
|
| I now think that the only use for tests and worksheets is for
| self-reflection, for the learner to discern whether or not they
| understand the concept the problem set is related to. A really
| enlightened education would never weigh the _completion_ of the
| problem set over the _mastery_ of the problem set, and there
| would be no factory-production model of forcing students to
| complete work and then gaslighting them into thinking they 'd
| "learned" something or that their time was well-spent. I don't
| know if that's possible to set up at scale, though.
| reidjs wrote:
| I think a lot of it does come down to scale. Imagine the
| challenge of being a teacher tasked with teaching
| (science/english/math/etc) to 150-200 unique kids per day,
| often with little to no budget or support from admin, parents,
| etc. Unless you are truly exceptional at teaching, you have to
| teach to the middle to compensate, or your class will tear
| itself apart.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Also in the US the incentives for going into teaching are
| totally wrong. We should train the best and brightest so that
| our kids learn from them, but the salaries and working
| conditions are so bad that it actively discourages people.
| AvocadoPanic wrote:
| What's the advantage to having the best and brightest
| teachers if they're in a room of average and dim students?
|
| Both teachers and students should be tracked by ability.
| Best teachers for the best students. Mid teachers for mid
| students.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| that assumes that average and dim are constants and
| unchangeable. but the point remains is that we're not
| even getting the best teachers to begin with, because the
| job is so unattractive if it's not your passion.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The best students may actually be fine with no teacher or
| a very hands off method.
|
| The students struggling the most may require the best
| teacher (and useful administration).
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| You are correct. But, as a teacher myself, it doesn't matter
| if you are good or bad as a teacher, you can't give every
| student what they need to best excel. Everything you do is a
| tradeoff that helps certain types of students, and others not
| so much. Perhaps make some disinterested in the topic.
|
| As a teacher or institute, you decide on a teaching
| philosophy, which then determines your tradeoffs in practice.
| And you live with the result.
|
| This is no different from, as many on this forum will
| understand, writing software for a certain type of user.
| Changing the UI or featureset will tradeoff the type of users
| interested in your software. You can't satisfy everyone.
| esafak wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Just based on your post, you seem like a pretty competent
| writer. That's not a natural skill; a lot of people can't do it
| well. Do you think you would have learned that sitting at home?
|
| Like, maybe school wasn't perfect and access to a team of
| private tutors would have put you in a better place today. But
| I'd hazard a guess your school assignments were more useful
| than you think. Process, not product.
| quacked wrote:
| Thank you for your compliment.
|
| To clarify, I'm not saying that it's possible to learn to
| write without writing a great deal. I certainly wouldn't have
| learned to write well without writing often.
|
| However, I didn't learn to write particularly well until I
| was out of college and had begun writing for myself. In
| school I was rarely interested in ensuring that what I was
| writing was interesting, well-phrased, or enjoyable to read.
| Those qualities simply weren't prioritized, which is weird,
| because those are the qualities by which writing is judged in
| "the real world".
|
| I certainly relied on basic writing practice I received in
| completion-based classes, but my claim isn't that I didn't
| learn anything useful in school, it's that the time I did
| spend in school was poorly allocated and resulted in an
| underdeveloped product.
|
| "If children started school at six months old and their
| teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single
| generation people would come to believe that humans couldn't
| learn to walk without going to school."
| RationalDino wrote:
| Most people who go through school don't learn to become
| competent writers. This is shows that school does not teach
| people to be competent writers.
|
| So competent writers generally did not learn that skill in
| school. At best they learned some foundational skills. But
| the competent writers that I've known, often think that there
| were betters ways in which they could have learned those
| skills.
|
| I have sometimes been accused of writing competently. And so
| it should be no surprise that I agree with them. School was a
| terrible way for me to learn. And I credit most of my skills
| to things that I did outside of school.
|
| This goes doubly for homework assignments. As
| https://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-myth/ explains, research
| shows that homework is useless overall. It can help, or it
| can hurt. And on average it balances out to no net benefit.
|
| I have ADHD. This reduces the odds that homework helps and
| increases the odds that it hurts. Growing up, homework was a
| constant burden on my life. I would have been far better off
| if I'd been given less homework. Particularly homework which
| looks like a practice drill.
| dale_glass wrote:
| That's a weird way of looking at it.
|
| Of course you produced nothing of value. Learning in school is
| about absorbing already existing knowledge. Barring some really
| exceptional anecdotes like Gauss figuring out how to
| efficiently sum series in school, it's pretty much certain that
| you'll come up with nothing new whatsoever.
|
| But surely some of that had to sink in, and that was the point.
|
| In the long term, the vast majority of things fade away. I
| spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory
| management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's
| probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not
| completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot
| from that.
| quacked wrote:
| > Of course you produced nothing of value. Learning in school
| is about absorbing already existing knowledge.
|
| That's certainly how it's set up today, but I find it
| difficult to believe that the most optimized, useful, and
| productive way to teach children about reality is the method
| we've settled on in the modern US. School _could_ instead be
| designed around the production of art, goods, and services
| that are actually desired and used by people in and outside
| of the school. This would be a great deal more difficult to
| set up and maintain than a series of gradeable worksheets.
|
| > Learning in school is about absorbing already existing
| knowledge.
|
| Under the current model, is the knowledge really absorbed?
| Math class is great example. Most people struggle through
| algebra and trigonometry worksheets for a few hundred hours
| and then immediately dump the knowledge when they graduate
| and can't even name the three primary triangle side-ratios
| five years later. Was completing curated problem sets under
| threat of a worse career if they failed really the best use
| of their time? That can't be the best way to teach them.
|
| > I spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory
| management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's
| probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not
| completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot
| from that.
|
| Sure, but you were producing something of value. When you
| learned about an issue, you went hunting for the root cause
| because people were actually relying on you to do so, and
| when you fixed the issue you felt real satisfaction, and
| retained a desire to remember what you'd done. Also, you were
| paid.
|
| I would wager a good deal of money that what you learned
| while managing the app stuck in your brain a lot more
| effectively than if the same activity had been taught to you
| in a class where you completed worksheets based on the
| inventory management platform.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Sounds a lot like turning school into a workplace.
|
| Sometimes when you want to learn something new you dive in
| and try to hack something together. But when it's
| sufficiently complicated or foreign you cant do that. You
| have to step back and study the underlying domain. That's
| school. Its an incredible luxury to do that for 16 years of
| your life while producing nothing of value.
| HPsquared wrote:
| School, as experienced by most people, is definitely not
| a luxury. It's closer to an ordeal.
| andrewjl wrote:
| > but I find it difficult to believe that the most
| optimized, useful, and productive way to teach children
| about reality is the method we've settled on in the modern
| US.
|
| You're spot on, it isn't. That's by design. The foremost
| goal of a modern education system is creating a labor
| force[1][2] that meets the projected demands of the
| economy. What is interesting to think about is that over
| time the type of workforce the economy needs changes and
| how that interacts with changes in education policy.
|
| Don't get me wrong, there is value in trigonometry but I
| think classes on probability, statistics, and basic
| financial math like compound interest and so on are much
| more impactful when it comes to aggregate outcomes. I don't
| think it has to be an either or type of thing.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_school
| eternityforest wrote:
| Everyone always talks about financial math, but it seems
| like the more important thing is the math that would help
| you make money in the first place.
|
| A "How to ensure that you never get a door dash or eating
| out or only fans habit" class, and creating a culture
| that didn't promote expensive status symbols might save
| people more money than knowing how to budget properly...
| dale_glass wrote:
| So what, you want students be actually employed and be
| producing something? I don't think that's going to work.
|
| So at around 13 I'd say that I was about the only one of my
| 30-ish classmates that was actually producing something
| that resembled working code. I coded a whole functional
| (but simple) sprite editor in QBASIC that could write PCX
| files.
|
| But honestly, that code was complete crap. I was barely
| figuring out what functions were good for, because most of
| that was being self-taught by reading the manual and trial
| and error. And compared to my classmates that was top 1%
| stuff.
|
| Nobody actually wants stuff like that for any serious
| purpose. No company wants that code, or being saddled with
| a few dozen teenagers, some of which are completely
| useless. And that goes for all fields. Who out there needs
| a human to do trigonometry these days? What about history,
| or literature? What does production there look like? Do we
| grade them based on likes and reviews on fanfiction.net?
| quacked wrote:
| > No company wants that code, or being saddled with a few
| dozen teenagers, some of which are completely useless.
|
| This is an efficient summary of the social attitude I'm
| criticizing. People believe that children and teenagers
| are useless. They believe this because the structure of
| modern education _requires_ young people to be useless.
| Every adult in their lives repeats variants of "you
| cannot and should not be trusted to do real work that
| other people need", and so young people grow up believing
| that.
|
| If instead of resenting their presence and demanding that
| they be warehoused away in the name of efficiency, adults
| in contemporary society ought to look forward to training
| young people to be useful. If you take this attitude, and
| regard every young person as a future ally in your
| endeavors to maintain civilization to a high standard, it
| becomes clear that what's being done in most schools is
| inefficient, poorly-managed, and counterproductive.
| dale_glass wrote:
| And that works in some contexts, like farming, where you
| give the kids a simple task like "paint a fence", "carry
| this from A to B", or "chop some wood".
|
| Approximately no company wants to deal with an unskilled
| person. It takes a pro weeks to even start doing
| something useful in most organizations, let alone to be
| an useful addition to the team. If teenagers could be
| expected to produce useful code, then we'd have companies
| hiring new, unexperienced developers, but pretty much
| nobody wants to.
|
| Now of course there are some really clever 12 year olds
| out there that can actually do cool things. But they're a
| very small proportion, and if you only deal with them
| then it's no longer education, but a mentorship for a
| select few.
| discussDev wrote:
| I think you should let kids be creative and TRY to make
| useful things, but the quality of most things I made in
| school when I was creative and developing things was
| rather low quality in general because I needed to have
| all the learning experiences. So I don't think in general
| kids should be trying to build quality useful things but
| maybe we can just let them take a shot at everything to
| see how to do it instead.
| troupe wrote:
| There are schools out there where kids are writing a lot of
| high quality essays, creating good video presentations that
| would hold their own against a lot of popular YouTube
| content, creating great photography, music, etc.
|
| I think most public schools tend to prioritize sports at
| the expense of most of those other activities.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I would argue families prioritize sports over those
| activities even more so. I have direct family members
| that played D1 and professional sports, and it's wild how
| high the level of commitment for non-pro track athletics
| has become since the 90's-early 00's.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Sports culture is so crazy. Why is it illegal for kids to
| smoke and drink and get tattoos, but we actively
| encourage sports that can cause lifelong injuries, while
| making almost no effort to promote any kind of low risk
| fitness, that doesn't make you feel so awful most people
| will just quit?
|
| In some cases, those sports involve gaining over 300lbs,
| which seems like it would largely counteract any benefits
| of the excercise.
|
| Although it does seem like there's a certain number of
| people with some kind of major psychological need to
| prove themselves to themselves and have some kind of way
| to measure their progress and know they are gaining
| strength every day, and for them sports might be better
| than the self destructive lifestyle they sometimes do if
| they get consumed by feeling like they're "not enough".
| gustavus wrote:
| So I am not necessarily going to disagree that the way school
| is setup up the optimal strategy is to cram and then purge the
| data after the test.
|
| However I have had a revelation recently in regards to learning
| where I realized that even if it is an intellectual skill we
| are trying to master, repetition is still required to do
| anything other than move a vague knowledge to applicable
| knowledge.
|
| I think part of the problem of schooling is that we focus so
| much on having knowledge and completely divorce it from
| practice or application in any way, meaning that the knowledge
| largely feels useless, and it results in students being
| unmotivated, and feeling as though time and effort is wasted.
| This is probably driven because most of these tests are simply
| "can you regurgitate the knowledge by filling in the right
| bubble? After all we know that the mitchondria is the
| powerhause of the cell, but there isn't much application anyone
| gets beyond knowing that fact.
|
| I think if our efforts were on mastery of a skill there can be
| value in worksheets, and homework.
|
| EDIT: I'll add given that you are on HN you probably also
| remember and understand more from school than you realize.
| quacked wrote:
| > I'll add given that you are on HN you probably also
| remember and understand more from school than you realize.
|
| Maybe--my claim isn't that I didn't learn anything in school,
| but that what I did learn was a fraction of what I could have
| learned, and that most of the material I was shown I now
| struggle to remember. I can barely recall a thing from any
| science class that wasn't reinforced by my engineering
| degree, and most of the things I know about history I learned
| after college when I started actually paying attention to it.
| Even my current geography skills are from repetitions outside
| of college as an adult.
|
| When you listen to the average American trying to put
| together a coherent argument about society, politics, foreign
| countries, history, etc., or even just to write a coherent
| email, you're seeing the result of years of worksheet-
| classes. These are people who are certain they possess a
| great deal of knowledge, when in fact their recall of
| specific facts and ability to reason logically are heavily
| atrophied from years of educational neglect and accidental
| gaslighting. "I got an A in English class and a 28 on the
| ACT, so I must be good at English!"
|
| > repetition is still required to do anything other than move
| a vague knowledge to applicable knowledge.
|
| I completely agree with this.
|
| Funnily enough, one of my issues with worksheet-classes is
| that there's not _enough_ repetition. Topics in classes from
| mathematics to English to science are treated like Pokemon
| moves, where once you learn the move you retain it forever.
|
| This is in stark contrast to the teaching of artisanal skills
| like cooking, sports, music, and art. Even if they're learned
| in a class, the successful execution of the skill is required
| every time you interact with it, and explicit attention is
| paid to the necessities of repetition.
|
| In music, if you can't play a passage, you slow down and
| repeat it many times, and if you still can't play it, you
| move backwards to fundamental skills and repeat those. In
| high school math, if you can't execute a problem, you get a
| few weeks to voluntarily try repeating it yourself, and then
| you're given an exam, and then the entire class moves on with
| or without you.
| RationalDino wrote:
| If the education system worked some spaced repetition into
| courses, they would be able to teach more material with
| less effort. And people would retain it better.
|
| No amount of intense cramming upon the first encounter can
| help You need reinforcement over time for it to stick.
| pnathan wrote:
| The US k-12 school system is well understood to, as a first
| approximation, optimize for average or a bit below. There are
| often carve outs for interesting tracks for kids.
|
| I'm not sure the right approach. Rigorous testing and sorting
| from an early age into silos of tracking kids has its own major
| flaws.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Hey, cool. I run a parallel / tangentially related little Ed tech
| business at www.reportcardcomments.com.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| As someone with a degree in physics, who's mother is a math
| teacher and helped build a state level math curriculum, it's hard
| to convey how much I hate Common Core as a parent. My son
| mercifully avoided it entirely by being too far ahead and then
| hopping out of state during the worst of it. But my daughter took
| it with both barrels between the eyes. Teachers who don't get it
| blaming students who ask their parents who try to explain and get
| told, by everyone, they don't understand. Batshit crazy
| conceptual jumps (If you have 17 triangles and divide them into 3
| equal groups, how many sides are in the remainder?). And then
| moving out of the California school districts, the new district
| didn't recognize those courses at all, so when she aced precalc
| and they didn't have enough kids to take calc, they had her take
| ... algebra 2. WTF?
|
| Then when she went to back to California for college, they made
| her take precalc AGAIN! Can you demolish someone's motivation any
| more? Fuck common core and the entire privileged shitshow of East
| Coast math professor elites that came up with this crap.
| entropi wrote:
| As someone who is from outside the US, and only occasionally
| exposed to common core via hatred on reddit, hn, etc., I would
| like to ask: what is the deal with it? I am kind of having
| trouble understanding what exactly it is.
|
| The examples I see about it are usually extremely simple to the
| point of having no information or testing ability, and others
| are just batshit insane like your example.
| loco5niner wrote:
| Just for kicks, I had it generate some printable flash cards,
| questions on front, answers on back.
|
| _It 's impossible to print them correctly, as they are produced
| because the answer is on the upper-left quadrant of the first
| page and the answer in in the upper-left quadrant of the second
| page_
|
| Try it for yourself: https://www.commoncoresheets.com/flash-
| example/8/flash-cards...
|
| What kind of Common Core Crap is that?
| numbsafari wrote:
| It's probably just a bug. I don't see how it would have
| anything to do with the Common Core.
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(page generated 2023-11-09 23:00 UTC)