For grade school and high school, there are set educational standards for certain subjects. These are the guidelines that each teacher must follow for their core classes, such as English and math. However, sometimes teachers will try to bend the rules and teach these courses their own way. Math is a subject that may face issues when it comes to the Common Core Standards.
The Purpose of Common Core Standards
The Common Core Standards are in place to ensure that all children get an equal education regardless of where they are attending school. These standards are created to be consistent and easy to understand so that kids will test well during assessments. With the Common Core Standards, students should be set up with all the tools and knowledge they need by the time they graduate high school.
What are the Common Core Standards for Math?
The specifics for each grade varies, but there are a few specific guidelines that must be met for every grade. Those common core standards are as follows:
- Make sense of problems and persevere in following them.
- Reason both abstractly and quantitatively.
- Create feasible arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
- Model with mathematics.
- Use the appropriate tools strategically.
- Encourage precision.
- Look for and make use of structure.
- Look for and express regularity in reasoning.
Math teachers must follow these rules regardless of which grade they are teaching. These standards will enhance the learning of students and make sure all schools teach math equally.
Do Math Teachers Follow These Core Standards?
For the most part, math teachers follow the Common Core Standards well. Kids are taught at a pace that is easy to understand, which includes basic adding and subtracting in first grade, multiplication, and division in third grade, and finally, more advanced topics in high school, such as algebra, geometry, and statistics.
While many teachers follow both the general and grade-specific standards, there will always be some that don’t agree with it and don’t completely follow it. This is because many teachers believe that all kids learn things differently and at different paces, so there cannot be just one way to teach them. The common core standards can often put pressure on teachers to teach a specific way, regardless of whether or not they feel it is the best way to teach, which is why the Common Core is not always taught as it was intended.
The 2018 Education Next poll revealed that more people have approved of their schools presently than they have in the past. Those who participated in the poll were instructed to rate their public schools with a grade from A to F. Each group, which includes parents, teachers, and the general public had given significantly more As and Bs than Ds and Fs. This is generally an improvement from past polls, revealing that more and more individuals are becoming satisfied with the common core system.
Therefore, some teachers may try to put their own spin on the common core standards, but for the most part, math educators just try to stick to the formats that they’re supposed to.
