Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Shedding light on local issues.
Golden Hills Elementary School Principal Heather Richter, speaking at the Tehachapi Unified School District Board of Trustees meeting Dec. 9. The graphic in her presentation illustrates a perception that Common Core math is incomprehensible.
Please do not try to do this problem at home. It is a joke.
Richter addresses parents who came on Math Night to find out how the math works and how they can help their children. The students learn four methods of solving problems, she said, and they "find which method works best with their brains."
A graphic shows four ways primary school students can approach the multiplication problem 156 x 3. They can begin the process with an estimate using rounded numbers, break apart the problem using the distributive property, solve using partial products or they can regroup. Students are expected to be able to explain their method and why they chose it.
Golden Hills fourth grade teacher Vicki Lange answers questions from parent Olivia Messier at the school's Common Core Math Night Dec. 10.
GH Principal Heather Richter showed the school board how students demonstrate their understanding of number comprehension by various visual means. The work on the left (the four squares) is by a fourth grade special education student. The squares are "skip counting," "equal groups," "repeated addition" and "array." The work on the right showing place values by graphs, pictures, cubes and expanded forms is by a second grade student.
The kids are doing fine with Common Core math concepts and vocabulary, teachers report, but parents who learned math differently tend to be baffled, so Golden Hills Elementary School hosted a Math Night Dec. 10, 2014 to help mom and dad catch up.
"Young mathematicians should be flexible with numbers," Golden Hills Principal Heather Richter told approximately 22 parents of elementary students in the Tehachapi Unified School District who gathered in the cafeteria. Eight teachers volunteered their time for the classroom sessions with parents.
Under Common Core – which is not vastly different from existing teaching methods and incorporates much of the previous California math standards – students learn, starting in kindergarten, how to break problems down into bite-size pieces and to explain how they got an answer.
"They have fun decomposing," Richter said.
The students are taught there is more than one way to deconstruct numbers and to solve problems, and they have a choice as to how to go about getting answers.
"I feel like we're putting the fun back in," said fourth grade teacher Vicki Lange, a veteran of 32 years of teaching.
The younger the students are exposed, the better, Richter said. Fifth graders will have had just one year of the Common Core method when it comes time to test at the end of the year, and administrators are not expecting outstanding results – for now.
