There’s growing criticism about what’s being taught in New York State public schools under the controversial new Common Core curriculum.
As CBS 2′s Carolyn Gusoff reported, even some parents said they cannot understand some math lessons under the curriculum that’s now in place in 45 states.
Homework time is stress time at the Ballato home, they say because of the Common Core curriculum.
” I had 90s and 95s in high school and I see this math. I can’t teach fifth grader how to do homework,” Michael Ballato told Gusoff.
“To see my fifth grader night after night after night doing math homework,” Irene Ballato added.
They have joined a chorus of complaints, arguing that the new curriculum is not only daunting for kids but too confusing for even parents trying to help out.
The problems involve dividing by first finding the factors of each number, Gusoff reported.
“Why do I have to use the distributive property to solve a simple problem? Ridiculous,” Irene Ballato said.
Some say even the kindergarten curriculum has them stumped.
“Even as parents looking at the work, sometimes I have to scratch my head and I can’t even find the answer for them,” mother Colette Paul told Gusoff.
“My parents couldn’t do the new math. They were frustrated by it because when we would bring stuff home, they couldn’t handle it,” State Sen. Carl Marcellino (R-Oyster Bay) said.
Read more at CBS NEW YORK.
{Matzav.com Newscenter}
It’s not the curriculum -it’s the books. Old math books were a lot better. Look at some of the math problems in some old math books and you’ll long for the good old days when gasoline cost 35 cents a gallon, a stamp cost 6 cents, a house was less than 30,000 and a car less than 4000. Bring back the old math books and the prices too.
It isn’t that it’s too challenging for the kids… it’s too challenging for the PARENTS. So dumb down what’s taught in school, in 75 years the US will be largely illiterate.
Pretty sad – and just what the liberal agenda wants.
Most parents feel as though its not their responsibility to put in the effort at home in order to help their kids. But they must. I agree that some if these new methods are very different from how we learned, but I don’t know for certain if that makes the method inferior. I can attest that many nights I had to also google ” what is the distributive method” but with some effort, I did figure it out and was able to instruct my child on how to go about solving the problem.
Now that my child is in 6th grade, and since I usually do the home work with him, I have seen a wide variety of math problems in his homework, many resembling problems that I’m more familiar with. I think if your not willing to put the effort in to helping your kids meet these very basic , and arguably inferior standards, then ask yourself who will?