Bill Gates is not part of the solution - just part of the problem.

This stuff burns me up:

"Common Core I would have thought of as more of a technocratic issue. The basic idea of, 'should we share an electrical plug across the country?' Well, you can get partisan about that I suppose. Should Georgia have a different railroad width than everybody else? Should they teach multiplication in a different way? Oh that's brilliant [sarcasm], who came up with that idea?

I've been listening to the Common Core debate - particularly with respect to the teaching of Math - with sadness and bitterness.

Not because I think their approach is awful - but because I think it's awesome.

Now you're quite right to wonder - Hey Lewy, what's "awesome" about teaching kids a way to calculate that's slow, more complex, and utterly incomprehensible to grown ups?

Well, that's a great question. You'd be dumb not to ask this question.

There is a pretty simple answer (details under the fold), but the Clerics and the Oligarchs haven't been really forthcoming about what that might be (probably because most of them don't know and don't care.)

The they have satisfied themselves with the hahaha look at the dumb hicks opposing progress in education narrative.

And predictably and understandably, the conservative blogosphere has responded with an omg clueless progs are teaching our kids total nonsense counter-narrative.

People like Bill Gates had a once in a generation opportunity to improve math education in this country. They took all their political capital and blew it, because they valued "smart guy" tribal identification and elite gratification over actually convincing people of something non-intuitive. Better to remain incomprehensible, deepen divisions, and generate extra opportunities to feel "smart" for you and your fellow travelers.

Gates is not the first arrogant geek to ruin a good argument and won't be the last, but he's emblematic to me of all that's wrong with our current would be "elite".

Both when he doesn't have anything to offer, and, especially, when he does.


The fine print is that the simple answer needs a lot of backing evidence.

But, since you're curious, the short, simple answer is that Common Core isn't aimed at teaching kids how to calculate answers, but how to think very generally and deeply about numbers and math. What we think of as "arithmetic", in fact, is just a handful of (manual) algorithms which were only codified recently in historical terms. Their critical importance is largely an illusion, a function of the era we grew up in.

And by "how to think" I mean create and exercise the right kinds of mental constructs and visualizations - connecting the symbol-processing part of the mind with the spatial-visualization part of the mind, in a way that makes more advanced mathematical concepts easier to learn.

The deeper kind of math education Common Core aims at is arguably more important in the age of computers - in fact it is a great background for the few kids who will grow up to program computers, and the many more kids who will grow up needing a deep understanding of the kind of results computers generate. (And if we lose computers, just for the sake of argument, then it will be important to have people who understand number and math very deeply, don't you think?)

Singapore has been using this kind of teaching for some time. The difference between Singapore 's teachers and our teachers using Common Core is that the Singapore teachers actually understand what they're teaching. The training for Common Core has been inadequate, and that's been part of the problem.

I'm not expecting people to believe me on my authority, just to entertain the idea that what I'm saying might have some validity.

But it's a shame nobody ever bothered even sharing this much with you, isn't it?