Gonsalves: A pi in my face

It was the day before 3.14, a day to celebrate the life of pi and honor the infinitely irrational. Not to get all Pythagorean, but you could say I've come full circle.

Back to elementary school, except this time around it was to get a closer look at the source of mathematical mayhem in my son's backpack. Yes, despite my culturally induced allergy to algorithms, algebra and pretty much anything beyond basic geometry, I was determined to get to the Common Core.

Walking toward the principal's office, I couldn't stop asking myself: Are you smarter than a fourth-grader? It was the question that haunted me any time Junior asked for help with his math homework. With our noodles already fried from work, there have been nights it took 30 minutes for my wife or me to decipher what in the Leonardo Fibonacci was going on.

Of course I can help my son with basic arithmetic. But as I'm pulling my hair out looking at this "new math," I'm wondering: What's with all of these steps and diagrams? Why are they making math more difficult than it needs to be?!

Led by my son's principal, Rosemary Williams, into a teacher meeting room inside Barnstable United Elementary School, I saw right away math was a big deal at the school. There were "Go Math!" curriculum materials all over the room.

"We are looking to align our curriculum to the new (Common Core) standards. It's very different than it used to be," she said, adding that Barnstable United Elementary is the only school in the district using Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's "Go Math!" curriculum to help prepare students for a state pilot test in May. The pilot test will help state education officials determine when, or if, the state should move from MCAS to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessment test.

And that was the first thing I learned: Common Core is not a curriculum. It lays out "standards" compiled by educators and business leaders at the behest of the National Governors Association — contrary to the notion of a federal communist plot to take over education right-wing activists are hyperventilating over.

Not that they don't have a point underneath their misdirected anger. But it's hard to take seriously folks who sat on their hands or were active cheerleaders for the federal No Child Left Behind law and its unfunded mandates — in the name of "raising standards" and "accountability" (read: busting up the teacher unions).

I mean, these are same people who tried to paint anyone questioning standardized tests and the stupid idea of linking teacher pay to academic outcomes as being anti-"reform." And now that "standards" are actually being raised — at the urging of workforce-seeking business leaders who want to privatize everything because they think the "free market" is the answer to every social problem under the sun, now they're crying foul? Beautiful minds.

Common Core standards were written by a hand-picked board of state actors, leaving the curriculum path to those standards up to local school districts.

I sat in on Steven Harmon's fifth-grade math class to see the Common Core-aligned "Go Math!" curriculum in action. It wasn't long before I understood why this "new math" frustrates so many parents.

When we were in school we learned by rote, memorizing abstract algorithms. But if students are going to stay interested, learn the rigors of quantitative analysis, and come away with an appreciation for the patterns and mathematical beauty imbued in nature in this age of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), they need a deeper understanding of the relationship between numbers.

Theoretically, once that foundation is laid they will be prepared to tackle higher-order math down the road. They call it "scaffolding."

The emphasis is on understanding why, not just how, algorithms work. Ideally, it's about creating thinkers, not calculating machines.

That's a shift in thinking that has many of us parents screaming: "But it's simple. Just subtract A from B to get C." As it turns out, however, in addition to cats, there's more than one way to skin a math problem. And that's the idea behind these alternative methods, modeling and diagrams, even in basic arithmetic.

Seeing Mr. Harmon's class attentively absorbed in making diagrams in their little blue books and on the classroom board, my frustration was slipping away. "I'm a visual person. I think in pictures. I wish I learned math like this," I whispered to myself.

In response to a question about this "new math," while the class worked on modeling the product of fractions, one student said, "It's harder."

"It makes algorithms harder. But the math is easier," said another. "It helps to simplify fractions." And another student said she successfully applied her understanding of fractions to a project at her church.

Mr. Harmon followed up by asking the class if it was "wrong" to arrive at a solution with a different method, which was followed by a chorus of "No." The important thing, he said, was being able to show how they came to a particular solution and to be able to identify their mistakes.

None of this is to say that memorization has been dumped. There's lots of math vocab that must be committed to memory. Neither does my exposure to the Core mean I don't still have deep philosophical and practical reservations, which I'd like to share with you in the coming weeks.

Still, as I left school with a copy of the 185-page "Massachusetts Curriculum Framework for Mathematics" under my arm, I had to wipe the pi off my face.


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