Did You Know That 5+5+5=15 is NOT correct? Angry parents baffled by 3rd grade Common Core Math

by Just An American | October 28, 2015 8:02 am

Parents are venting their outrage at the Common Core school standards [1]over a math quiz that was posted online, showing how teachers are marking students down even for correct answers. It’s as if they want our kids to hate learning…period.

[2]

The quiz, posted to Reddit, shows how a teacher marked two questions as incorrect on a third-grader’s math quiz, despite the student finding the solution to the problem.

Apparently, the reason for the deduction had to do with the petty fact of exactly how the student found the answer.

[3]

The first question asks the student to use repeated addition to solve the question 5×3. The student answers 5+5+5=15, but is marked incorrect. Instead, the teacher writes that the correct answer should have been 3+3+3+3+3=15.

The second question is marked incorrect in much the same way. In the second question, students are asked draw an array to solve 4×6. The student draws six rows of four and is again marked wrong, with the teacher drawing four rows of six as the correct answer.

These questions were marked wrong because children today are taught to read a question like 4×6 as four groups of six – not six groups of four. However, when it comes to single multiplication problems, it doesn’t matter which way the problem is read.

Since the picture was posted on Reddit, many have been using the quiz as a means to criticize the Common Core teaching standards.

Business Insider reports that defenders of Common Core say the grading is important, since reading questions this way will help students better understand multi-variable calculus – a class that’s at least nine years away for third-graders still learning to count in their head instead of on their hands.

However, AOL points out that the incorrect answer is not a Common Core issue.

While Common Core sets goals for knowledge in each grade, it is up to individual states, districts and teachers to come up with their own lesson plans to meet those standards.

Still, this isn’t the first time that the Common Core has been criticized for its new-age approaches to learning.

And they have the audacity to call this “critical thinking” …. when it’s actually not thinking. At all…