The Daily Caller – by Eric Owens
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has promised to improve education quality vastly by pushing for the implementation of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
This year, 45 states and the District of Columbia have implemented the Common Core standards and curricula based on those standards.
Duncan doesn’t much care for the people who criticize Common Core, either. He has insisted that it’s all a bunch of “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary.”
What, exactly, is the content of this Common Core that’s going to make American kids so much smarter? So far it appears to be a slew of worksheets and tests involving various, incomprehensible arrays of squares and circles.
There are also traditional word problems. Twitchy has found a word problem that may be the most egregiously awful math problem the Common Core has produced yet. Take a look:
@michellemalkin a great common core question a friend,who is a teacher, posted. Cc @TwitchyTeam pic.twitter.com/LUxlyMEG3k
— Kevin (@kevinpost) December 6, 2013
According to the Twitter user who posted it, the vexing problem came from a friend who is a teacher.
The problem comes from a Houghton Mifflin Assessment Guide. It appears among a larger set of basically similar math problems here. The problem involving Juanita appears on page AG102, nestled among some other problems that are similarly weak and crappy — though not nearly as harrrowing as the problem above.
Houghton Mifflin is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a huge textbook publisher. The company’s website promises to be “a partner who will share the responsibilities” of the Common Core: “We have created a wide range of content, curricula, and services to support school leaders, teachers and educators, parents, and especially students with this transition.”
Twitchy readers tried to tease out the answer to the Juanita problem — how can you not? – and determined that the answer is either 12, 24, 0 or 7.
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I got a funny feeling Texas and the other 4 states that do not use Common Core are about to get a whole lot of new residents, especially is they live in states where they can home school but must meet State guidelines (I’m looking at you, Massachussets!) I taught calculus to a very smart group of students once, and even I can’t figure this one out…I’ll say the answer is 4, just for the hell of it and so Juanita can save herself some money….
I don’t see enough information given, as it is posted, to even answer this question.
How many friends does Juanita have?
How many stickers are in a bag?
Could it be that “no child left behind” really means “no child gets ahead?”
The number is 6 🙂
Well, it sounds to me that she has 4 friends she really likes and 2 more that she thinks she needs to buy for either because they will get their feelings hurt if the other 4 friends get stickers and they don’t, or maybe she isn’t really all that good of friends with the other 2 and think they might bully her at school if she doesn’t give them stickers too.
So just to be on the safe side smart little Juanita bought 6 bags of stickers (Each containg the same amount of stickers) and gave them each a bag.
lol!
Here’s the real answer to that question. To live under tyranny the dumber the better the sheep need to be! Communist core is simply the next step in the decline of the education process.We no longer really have schools because they are Government Indoctrination Centers .They are complete with training in authoritarian rule,lock down ,and other prison type scenario’s . They even look like they could be used as prisons and that’s because they can ,a little razor wire and bingo,lock down!
Juanita’s dilemma was solved for her. She didn’t have to buy ANY stickers, once it was discovered she was an illegal alien and subsequently deported.
Wait. What the hell am I thinking?
They don’t do that anymore, do they.
Sorry. Wrong country.
Nice concept though.
You can’t fool me – if it was really Juanita they would have called them “Steeekers”
I looked at another question on the same page as Juanita’s problem. It read:
Kisha helped her teacher put away 36 books in boxes. She had to put the same number of books in each box to make them easy to carry. How many books could be in each box?
Hmm. Let’s think about this.
Who will be carrying the boxes, Kisha or her teacher? If it is Kisha, how old is she? If she is only in first grade and weighs little more than 36 books in boxes, she may opt to put less books in boxes than, say, her other sister Kisha, who is in the tenth grade and, due to a diet of processed foods all her life, may be big enough to carry all 36 books in one box.
And what about the size and weight of the books? Are we talking about a set of paperback Harlequin romance books, or hardback algebra and science textbooks?
Oh wait…do they still teach algebra and science in school?
Another question where it is at the teachers discretion…OR there simply are no wrong answers!
No losers no winners…yet everyone will be dubbed a winner.
A nice communist ideal. Perfect for all those that seek the almighty “fair”.
Until the last vestiges of critical thinking are utterly destroyed.
12 stickers is a good answer as it is divisible by 6 or 4. She should figure out how many friends she has before giving equal stickers to her ‘friends’.
Common core q&a
Q: If john has 1 50round mag for 5.56 and 2 50round mags for 7.62 what kind of gun should he own?
A: NONE. He is a terrorist for owning assault weapons.