"Children, why do we go to school? So we won't be stupid." This quote by my AP English teacher will never leave my mind because it's the honest answer to why we go to school. If you have opened Facebook before and you're friends with a parent, you have probably heard about parents reactions to Common Core. This argument has been fought for years now, with forty-two states taking up Common Core as its state level education standard. Some people think that Common Core doesn't have a place in the educational system because it confuses kids or because it is different from the way they learned when they were in school. While some of the arguments you will hear from Facebook might be skewed or over exaggerated, it is definitely a flawed system. My essay will cover various topics from my citations, such as the use of scholarly journals that show the before and after Common Core was implemented and regular biased articles from the parents of kids in Common Core. Common Core was designed entirely to help kids do better in school and help prepare them for college better than the old system. I am personally not a fan of the new Common Core standards, and they do not reflect the goal they wish to maintain. 

When I was still in high school, I always heard about parents saying Common Core had the most ridiculous way of teaching things, of course all of my teachers thought it was stupid and didn't go with the new standards. I only had a few teachers in school that actually thought Common Core was a good idea, and I could tell a difference in their teaching methods. 

When I was in the ninth grade, the first year that my school decided to try Common Core, and my algebra two teacher was one of the first teachers to try it out. She had taught for twenty years, so you would think that she would know what she was doing, but by the end of the class, she had almost fifty percent of her students failing because people said that her new style of teaching was impossible to learn from.

Fast-forward to my junior and senior year of high school, where I am taking Pre-Calculus and AP Calculus. Pre-Calculus has a direct relationship to algebra two, with most of the material connecting geometry with algebra and then taking it another step further. I put much less effort into this class but learned everything in a way I could understand it: giving us small bits of information and having us fill in the rest. I found this to be the best way for me to learn because it requires effort by my part to learn the material. For example, when learning about the trig identities and the relationship between them, my teacher gave us the basic formula cos2x + sin2x = 1, and the knowledge that there were two other formulas that could be derived from that and told us about csc, sec, and cot. By using dividing the first formula by cos or sin, you can get the other two equations 1 + tan2x = sec2x or cot2x + 1 = csc2x. I am a big fan of this teaching method but it isn't implemented in Common Core, focusing more on other things.

If forty-two states were to agree on a singular education system it must have been made by a board of brilliant teachers who make AP tests, would you believe that they were made by politicians and college professors? In Common Core is designed to make the previous education system more problem solving and analysis than just learning. This is mirrored from the Japanese and Finnish educational systems, both of which are regarded as the best educational systems in the world. Both Japan and Finnish rely almost entirely on student-centered learning so that it invokes problem solving and collaboration with other students, which is what Common Core would like to do. While this form of education seems ideal to someone like me, when I went through Common Core I was forced to memorize a bunch of formulas and just expect to understand what they meant. In Common Core standards: The new U.S. intended curriculum, it talks about how politicians and some college professors took inspiration from Japan and Finland and tried to replicate their educational systems by using some problem solving elements but sometimes going to the extreme with oversimplifying things to the point of confusion. Our educational program is ranked seventeenth overall in the world, with Finland in first place. The thing that Finland and Japan have in common is that they each implement a strong focus in problem-solving, which is great for people who are great with math, science and engineering. 

Are the teachers themselves happy with the new educational system? In South Carolina, it isn't the official state standard but some of my teachers implemented in high school with little success. I went back to talk to my AP English teacher, and from his point of view he said that Common Core was never designed by teachers, and because of that politicians are using their power to control the educational system. Going back to the Common Core standards: The new U.S. intended curriculum, it wasn't designed by teachers, so it would make sense why some teachers wouldn't like it. In "The Long Death of Creative Teaching", it talks about another valid issue, the fact that the kids who excel in a subject are stuck in the same classes as those who aren't as fast of learners. I am definitely a math and science person, and because of that, I have always done very well in math and science aside from algebra two with a bad teacher. In AP Calculus, there was only one kid who didn't learn things as fast as the rest of us, but he would study every night and work his hardest to get a good grade, but our classes could only take the speed of its slowest learning person, the teacher doesn't want to leave people behind and because of that they have to teach the same things over and over perhaps through different grades. This is also very true with kids in elementary school, if they don't understand division on the first day of class, the teachers will slow down until everyone understands it, meanwhile the kid who learned it the fastest is possibly drawing and is scolded for not paying attention. The only way that this could be fixed is to integrate more individual programs such as classes that are designed for the kids who are really good with math and science and classes that are designed for the kids who are really good with English and history. Instead of generalizing education in public schools it would be better to have a more individual approach to each student so that they will stay engaged and motivated to stay in school. 

Like I said earlier, Common Core was inspired by other countries educational systems such as Finland and Japan, but are they really an improvement? In "Common Core: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly", the author says that the way it was implemented by itself was a mistake, saying that it was too fast to put it on almost the entire country for a test run. It would have probably been better to try it out with a few schools in a few different states, for example, have one in a southern state, one in the big city, one in the Midwest and a few other places just to see how it would work across different places in the country. 

I have mentioned this before but haven't talked about it as much, but parents have been outraged with Common Core, some taking their frustration out on Facebook of other parts of the internet. "The Dad Who Wrote a Check Using "Common Core" Math Doesn't Know What He's Talking About." Is an article that talks about an electrical engineer that tried to help with his kid's homework using some of the ways of teaching from Common Core, and says that it is so complicated that it was impossible for any children in the school system to learn from the new ways of thinking. With parents not able to help their kids in some areas such as math, there certainly is a disfavor among parents. 

With these different methods of doing the same thing, I saw this problem in my own home, with my brother, along with the kids I tutored at school. Because I was one of the best math students at my high school, I was asked to help tutor kids with algebra, geometry and pre-calculus, and since my brother is great at writing but not the best with math, I would have to help him with math.

 My brother had a very strange way of doing subtraction, he would have to look at individual numbers and say if he could subtract those and if not, multiply that number by ten in order to make it subtract, then do that with every number. With a number like 364  --  182, he would take nine steps in order to solve it, completely ignoring the entire purpose of drop-down subtraction, what most people learned in elementary school before the advent of Common Core, with drop-down I was able to do it in six much more simple steps. He learned the drop-down much faster than the other method, but some kids are learning a new way of subtraction that involves true or false statements, which would possibly help with programming, but has no actual subtraction, instead it relies on the basis of knowing how far away numbers are from other numbers and finding a common number. For example, let's look at the problem I mentioned earlier, 364  --  182. Start out by seeing that that seeing that 300 is 100 away from 200, 200 is 18 away from 182, so we can get rid of the 200, and since 364 is 64 away from 300, we will add the 64 and 18 together with the left over 100 and we get 182. This problem isn't terrible because most people who understand math would be able to notice that 182 is one half of 364, so you would be able to see that this problem is doable, I couldn't figure out how to use this method for more complex problems past the thousands. It's mostly the idea in itself that I am not really subtracting is what throws me off as to what kind of person actually likes this method.

The high school kids weren't safe from the threats of strange methods of math either. One of the strangest things was in a pre-calculus tutor session when we were going over trig identities, and we had to find the value of sin2x, which is one of those formulas you have to memorize because it's complicated to teach the long way around. The formula for it is sin2x = 2sinx*cosx, if x = Pi/4, sin(Pi/2) will equal one, to prove the double angle theorem we would have to insert the Pi/4 into our other function, both sin(Pi/4) and cos(Pi/4) equal the square root of two divided by two, so multiplying the two together would cancel the square roots and leave us with two divided by four times two with equals one. This student was trying desperately to be able to find a way to use division as a way to partition both the two out of the equation because some teacher she had told her that division was taking parts of something, and that you shouldn't memorize things in math. Unfortunately for most math past algebra there are plenty of formulas to memorize unless there is a way that the student can connect everything such as with trig identities when I realized that I could use the reciprocal of a trig function to cancel it to get one. Common Core is trying to get rid of memorization in math, which has been one of the things that helped me understand most of Calculus. After showing the student the connection between things she told me it went against everything that her middle school math teacher told her math could do. Which doesn't help the case for Common Core if it is limiting people in school. 

Is there an argument for the teacher that actually likes Common Core? I am not saying all of Common Core is atrocious, but I would have to agree with where they are getting their source and that the government is actually trying to help the educational board. 

In NEAToday's article on "Six Ways the Common Core is good for Students", it tries to give the accounts of various teachers on how they use Common Core in the classroom and how it is better than the traditional teaching method. This article also tries to throw a curve to the whole "I hate Common Core because it's stupid" movement that parents and retired teachers are taking, and I still feel like my two cents could help the student's perspective. I believe firmly that the last two bulletins directly conflict with my personal education. "Common Core Gets Kids Ready for College", this whole statement is wrong to me. I believe kids should be motivated by something to go to college, for me it was to be able to be a part of my dream job as a computer engineer but also to learn everything I can. On the other side of things, the bulletin right before it states "Common Core Advances Equity", I believe that education shouldn't depend on economic situations. Education is a requirement, the motivation to learn something is entirely choice, if students want money, they get jobs in high school, with a job, grades may drop, and they lose motivation to learn. Common Core doesn't equate to equal opportunity, and if students who are motivated by those who are there because of legal bindings, then the class will slow down for those who are willing to work for it. At the end of the day Common Core isn't helping us, the whole "common ground" as I am calling it is hurting the both the smart kids and the not as smart kids, they're unable to keep at each other's pace and neither are benefitting and economic situations shouldn't have anything to do with education.

So what can we do to fix our situation with Common Core? The first problem we have started out with is that it was implemented in over half the country in a single year without a base test. It has a good intention but data would have helped us see if the change in educational policies would have been able to see what works, what doesn't, and work out the kinks in the system. I do agree that problem-solving should be integrated into our educational system, it helps support education for science, math, engineering and technology, where many of the futures jobs are going to be. But there is still a need to help with writing and history, through my search for reasons why people love and hate Common Core, there isn't much teachers can do to change the way they teach history or English other than have fun activities for the kids. At this point with Common Core, it has a strong dislike by parents, some of the teachers, and others in the community, since kids are our next leaders. The Common Core should have been made by the teachers, not politicians. Teachers are the ones who shape our future, and they should be allowed to teach however they want. At the same time if the country had a mandate on how much each kid learned by the end of the school year, it would make it easier on the kids who are from families who move often and they don't get behind or won't make rich schools have the best education. Again at the same time the country is too diverse with the wealth-distribution. The only way Common Core could work perfectly is if our society was socioeconomically equal, with all schools getting the same funding and all teachers were taught the same way to incorporate the new standards. This makes the students sound like they are spending a day in the life of Ivan. In order for Common Core to work in our society is to incorporate the things that make the Finnish successful: teaching problem-solving, giving a better motivation to learn more than one language, where the Finnish have to learn Swedish, Finnish, and English; incorporate Spanish into early childhood education, and give a friendly and open environment for children to want to never stop learning. 

Overall Common Core the way it is, it is not helping the United States of America. Common Core needs some reworking and this will probably take some time as teachers figure out what they can do with Common Core and if it is worth the trouble of establishing a new educational system. If there is anything I would want to say about fixing it now is that we need to fix Common Core math and make it to where it is easier to transition to higher level math. Common Core just needs to be tweaked to where the parents of the students, the teachers, and lawmakers are happy and fulfills its purpose.

