rotten core

Common Core Programs a Child’s Brain Like a Computer

By Mack Rights from The Bunker

I’ve been thinking more and more about that video on Common Core math that was posted on The Blaze recently.  It was an interview with a grammar school teacher in Williamsville, NY- one of the really nice suburbs of Buffalo.  Quit with the giggles, there really are nice places around Buffalo.  Go Bills.

You can see the video below.  The second video is how to do Common Core subtraction, but it’s so ridiculous that the news lady cuts the teacher off in mid thought.  In the first one, the teacher teaches the reporter the Common Core Math method of adding 9 and 6.  Rather than just telling kids to memorize it, she reduces the two numbers to components to fit them on a base 10.  10 is made up of 9 and 1, while 6 is made up of 1 and 5.  Take the one from 6 and give it to the 9 so you have 10 and 5, which is much more “comfortable” for children.  I’m not kidding you.  Watch the video.  Here’s a bit of the transcript:

“Our young learners might not be all together comfortable thinking about what 9 plus 6 is. They are quite comfortable thinking about their friend 10,” the teacher says in the video. “10 is emphasized in our young grades as we are working in a base-10 system. So if we can partner 9 to a number and anchor 10, we can help our students see what 9 plus 6 is.”

She continues: “So, we are going to decompose our 6 and we know 6 is made up of parts. One of its parts is a 1 and the other part is a 5. We are now going to anchor our 9 to a 1, allowing our students to anchor to that 10. Now our students are seeing that we have 10 plus 5. Having them now more comfort seeing that 10 plus 5 is 15. That is much more comfortable than looking at 9 plus 6, an isolated math fact.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uc3Pv5Q_AdA

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y7o08jqJhew

Complicated problems aren’t solved with the necessary rigor when kids are forced to stay in their comfort zones.  No wonder so many kids are turning into homosexuals.  They’re being treated like morons and need an excuse to drop out of society and not procreate so they’re not responsible for bringing children into this messed up world.

I’ve concluded that, if I had to go to a Common Core school and have my brain harnessed by this huge focus on process, I’d have had to get a bad drug habit just to kill off enough of my brain to live down to expectations.  I’d be bored out of my mind and completely unable to contain myself with all the nonsense they’d be teaching me.  I probably would have quit school.  Honestly.  It would have been that intolerable for me.

This Common Core method emphasizes process much more than it does getting the right answer.  It leaves massive amounts of room for socialist shenanigans.  By that I mean, the teacher can give credit to kids who get the answer wrong because they had the right idea about process.  At the same time, the teacher can take credit away from the students who got the right answer because these students refused to be bothered with the silly process aggravation that the teacher insists upon.  They’ll write: “9 + 6 = 15,” with the implication that they don’t need no stinkin’ math crutch, and they’ll only get partial credit.  And if the teacher’s a real jerk, they’ll lose even more credit for an implication containing a double negative.

You might not know this about me, but I used to be a math wiz. I’m still good, but I doubt I could accurately predict the trajectory of an NSA spy drone travelling at the speed of doughnut disappearance in an diabetes-free office with at least five employees weighing over 300 pounds and only two of them on a diet. The correct answer is: “It’s going to your house too, liberal.” But if you don’t show your work under the Common Core rules, you can’t get the question right.

Back in the day though, I took my math classes from Junior High into Senior high at the local University, along with 59 other kids from the four or five county region.  By the time we graduated, there were 22 of us left. It was a hard program.  We pretty much all went on to the Ivy League or MIT.  It was my ticket through the Ivy-covered gates and into the land of mind-numbed liberal robots, even though I’d grown up with nowhere near the amount of money it would have taken to get in there, were it not for this program.  I didn’t get there because I was rich and had connections.  I got there because I worked harder than just about everybody else, and that’s the reason I mention this.  Yet, I was taught by social convention that I should be ashamed to admit that. “Don’t say that out loud. The slackers will get sad. Then they won’t do anything, and it will be your fault.” That right there is Common Core logic.

But that’s another story.  I actually still occasionally have nightmares about my math homework problem sets.  It’s the worst- actual nightmares from which I wake up in a sweat.  But I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.  It basically accelerated the math teaching for students that could handle it, and obviously, with a 63.3% dropout rate, many couldn’t.  It prepared me for the rest of life by being the hardest thing I’d ever experienced. They, who ran the math program, never sought to keep us in our comfort zones.

Regarding this specific math video above, it is forcing children to focus on a process to do something as simple as add 9 and 6.  The process is useful, but it’s something one learns in their head and doesn’t ever put on paper.  It’s as if the Common Core process is taking away the kid’s ambition to be creative and work out ways to solve problems on his own.  It’s insidious in that it causes the kid to spend all his time showing work that should be done in his head and forcing him to stress out about showing the work correctly, rather than getting the correct answer.  Normal people call that misplaced priorities.

Math sets itself apart from other subjects.  The answers in math are either right or wrong.  It’s the language of God- the same in any language.  9 + 6 is 15, no matter where you are in the universe and no matter what language you speak.  Science, which often needs the language of math, is also an exacting subject.  English, History and all the other crap they make kids learn are filled with subjective corners that the teacher can cut in order to pass a dumb kid.  I don’t mean to pick on dumb kids, but we spend way too much time coddling dumb kids because they’re not comfortable adding 9 and 6 without their “friend 10.”  They should have just memorized it.  The smart kids are bored out of their minds, and that’s what today’s rant is all about.

All I know, this base-10 form of addition is the kind of thing that I came up with on my own.  It’s just a simple math trick, but it should, by no means, be part of the process.  The math tricks I needed to come up with, just to keep up with the other smart kids in the math program, were eventually much more complicated.  Without encouraging the creation of the ability to figure out math shortcuts on their own, how do children figure out the harder ones later?  How do Americans carry on our mantel as the most creative people in the world when we’re teaching our children not to be creative but to think like robots?

That’s what this process is.  It’s teaching kids how to use various subroutines to solve simple problems, but the subroutines are all supplied.  It’s as if these teachers are programing children like a computer would be programed.

It then makes sense that it is Bill Gates who is the lead funder of the Common Core scheme.  He’s the brilliant Harvard-dropout software programmer and founder of Microsoft who is buying off all the politicians pushing this crap.  Common Core teaching methods are structured like a computer program.  It might make sense to him, but the process isn’t naturally human.  The human mind shouldn’t be treated like a computer.  It’s a little more complex.  A lot more complex.

Oddly enough, jamming ADHD kids with drugs is also like treating the mind like a computer.  It’s like opening up your computer and slapping a larger fan on a liquid-cooled extra-large heat sink so the chip will work faster.  Altering brain chemistry with a neurotransmitter-reuptake-inhibitor drug is the same concept.  The only problem is that the child’s brain chemistry becomes so altered, with the use of that drug, that depression and self-medicating drug abuse are very often consequences later on in life.  How many times have we heard adults use the excuse that they were put on Ritalin as a kid for their adulthood coke habit?  The potentially brilliant child can grow up to be a broken robot.

More oddly enough, it’s the sedentary lifestyle that children now live, while on computers and video game consoles, that is causing so many children to have extra energy that’s being dissipated with drugs.  Rather than playing outside or working on the farm, they’re sitting in front of a monitor.  It’s all Bill Gates’ fault.

The sad thing is, a lot of kids diagnosed with ADHD are just kids who are really smart in a really slow educational environment.  They have energy- because children have energy- and a wandering mind because the lesson plan is going way too slowly.  They’re bored out of their freakin’ minds.  They don’t need drugs to slow their mind up.  They need to be put in a classroom with children smart enough to learn at their pace.  They also need more exercise.

But that’s not the goal of Common Core.  Common Core seeks to create a situation where all students are equal.  The slower kids get credit for using the process but being wrong, while the smarter kids are right but will lose credit for refusing to follow the stupid process.  Everybody “earns” a C that will be curved up to a B.

If we’re seeking to become like China, where the Cultural Revolution killed off all free-thinking men or anyone that would refuse to give up their ability to think freely, then Common Core is probably a less brutal method of doing that.  The Chinese are not creative anymore.  Free thinking gets you thrown into a gulag where they cut you up and sell your organs to rich people who refuse to wait in line for an organ transplant.

Without Americans who create and solve problems, who will take over?  China steals and copies.  They do not create, and the rest of the world sits around wondering what America will come up with next.  What will China steal and copy if we don’t have anything new to offer them when our future citizens are all a bunch of inefficient robots running too many subroutines with syntax errors to actually get to the right answer?  Participation trophies only mean something to those giving them out.  No kid works really hard to get a participation trophy.  A C curved up to a B means nothing when everyone gets a B.  When everyone’s exceptional, no one is.  Do you need any more clichés?

When the difference between right and wrong is determined by how well the student followed the process, then what kind of society will we have?  What’s the difference between good and evil if everything is right and hardly anything is wrong?  A child’s mind that is programmed like a computer will eventually have the moral aptitude of a computer.  A human with a computer for a mind is really just a robot, and if humans are robots, this will really screw up Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2) A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

 Think about that, while you still can.