A Math Teacher Loses It When Students Want a Right Answer

I've had a few people respond to my posts about common core with Louis C.K.-style objections:
"I don't understand why they went and changed the math."

One of the more personal responses was from an old friend who explained how her daughter was very frustrated with some math homework that was asking the students to use different techniques to get to a problem's answer. My friend told her daughter to ignore the instructions and just do it the old-fashioned way;
the way my friend was happy to show her daughter.

The child was very pleased to have an answer, and everyone in the house was relieved, because everyone knew how to get the right answer.

The problem with this story is treating math like a simple answer-finding exercise is what holds kids back later when the math gets difficult.

This blog post by teacher Brook Powers gets at that and asks a provocative question: Who broke our kids?

When did we brainwash kids into thinking that math was about getting an answer?  My students truly believe for some reason that math is about combining whatever numbers you can in whatever method that seems about right to get one “answer” and then call it a day.  They rarely think about what they are doing as long as at the end of the day their answer is “correct”.  

Go check out the post. It does a lot to demonstrate why they went and changed math.