Common Core Reflection

My initial response to watching the video, Why Students in the US need Common Core, was a deeply emotional sigh. As I mentioned in my previous paper, my experiences with math have been marked with what I call damage to my math psyche. In relation to this course, I have yet to have that “aha” moment in which all of learning has connected. Jo Boaler points out, students, including myself, have been conditioned to think of math as a performance goal, not a learning skill. This is deeply imbedded in me. I still approach the mathematical tasks as a right or wrong response in the shortest amount of time. This creates an anxiety that literally shuts down my thinking and disables all my confidence. I have yet to reprogram my brain to approach a given …show more content…
By allowing students to have a more conceptualized understanding and then being able to apply that knowledge is vastly more important than simply plugging numbers into a formula and getting the correct output. I can certainly understand why teachers and parents struggle with this idea. It is foreign to them as well. Additionally, core requirements move so quickly in the classroom, it does not allow for time to explore mathematical relationships. It’s ultimately detrimental to the students learning, therefore, society, because students cannot solve problems. Admittedly, when I was reading the article, and the author posed questions about how to solve certain scenarios, I instinctively thought, “google it.” This is also a problem! We have learned via technology to solve problems on the internet and not to think about how to actually come up with a solution independent of any outside sources. We are an increasingly dumbed down society. Is this a problem created by teacher-led instruction or laziness? It quite possibly could a combination of the two. I do not believe myself to be lazy but it is problematic to attempt to solve a real-life math problem because I