Common Core Transitions...

It was a good day to plan... Until we really saw the curriculum changes...

(note: the following problem has nothing to do with the 7th grade mathematics curriculum.     It is just a challenging problem for fun, and for my conclusion...)

Tonight I have a tiny beef. We sat down as a team of teachers to plan for the week ahead. We knew there'd be changes to the curriculum. We weren't expecting what we found...

With the changes due to Common Core, students who would have expected to solve simple proportion problems utilizing technology are now expected to solve complex problems without their calculators. Last year they mostly saw whole numbers. This year, entirely fractions, mixed numbers, and decimals.

I'm all for strengthening the rigor of mathematics to ensure true student learning and success in school and real life. However, these giant curriculum leaps create massive learning gaps that many students (if not most) cannot overcome in a single year... This is especially true at my school where so many families come from a low-income household.

I just wish that curriculum was implemented at the low grades and transitioned through year-by-year rather than implementing it at all grades all at once. This, in my opinion, is what true concern for students would look like.

Many intelligent people can find a solution to the problem at the beginning of this post. But if you really want to feel how the Common Core transition feels to my kids, make sure you write the formula for the infinite number of solutions to that problem. We wouldn't want to neglect the rigor required to accurately answer that question...