I originally had this entire piece written out as a diatribe against modern mediums of communication and how ubiquity of these mediums is slowly turning us into angry, bitter cunts with no intelligence or capability to analyze ourselves in order to work towards being less angry, bitter cunts. I was then interrupted by a picture my friend sent me about some worksheets she had to give to her class. My friend works in early childhood education, so through grades K-5. I expected to see goofy drawings, crayon marks and essentially really cute shit that comes with children learning and being what they are: dumb. I, unfortunately, was not prepared for what I actually came:

Are you shitting me?

I had forgotten that the Common Core was a thing. This is because, like any sane person, I had locked away anything associated with it into a mental box, shoved that mental box into a closet, dumped the closet into a hole, buried the closet with dirt, then dug another hole around the first hole and encased the entire thing with concrete. For those of you trying to think of what this looks like, just think of a concrete pipe and the middle is where the first hole is.

I would say that I’m at a loss for words, but I’m not. I never am, and especially not when it comes to criticizing anything, and even more especially when it comes to criticizing how this upcoming generation of people is taught and how they learn. I’ll never be at a loss for words because my generation is the one teaching these children, and my generation is retarded to the infinite degree. You might call that harsh, but I would point you to the recent events like the Black Lives Matter ‘protests’, the current state of Feminism and the responding statement of MGTOW and MRA/Red Pill.

The Common Core, at face value, would seem great. The idea is to set a baseline and then test to that baseline and then move that baseline up as children grow. That way, you always have a point of reference where you need to be, and where you’re going to. It also means this system heavily relies on the design of the baseline, as it needs to be simple & easy to understand to hit the widest amount of people. This is where the plane that is the Common Core crashes in the hanger, because the system is not designed by educators by practice and profession, but by people who come up with ideas to try and solve problems the nation is facing but then get angry with each other that nobody agrees and start yelling and screaming while making other people who are even less qualified to solve the problem. In other words,  politicians or, in a better word, idiots.

While I was forming the above, I spent that time also looking for other examples of the Common Core to see if they had come up with better examples that were more applicable and useful. Alas, I came up empty-handed in that regard, but I did manage to find some hum-dingers. To detail why the Common Core is garbage tier, I’ll dissect what I’ve managed to find in detail.

We’ll start with the image above. The title is ‘Units’ and students are tasked with circling items that are bigger than a crayon they select in red and smaller than that crayon in blue. They are then to flip the page over and draw something bigger, smaller and the same size as the crayon, which makes sense because why would you want to ruin those magnificently pixelated pictures of buses with your shitty kid-level drawing skills? I certainly don’t, and neither does Maddox (you’re welcome).

First, what in the fuck does this teach a young child about the concept of units? Units don’t measure anything, they describe types of measurements. I get that the assignment is supposed imply that we’re dealing with length here, but why in the hell are we using a subjective medium to perform the measurement? Here are three reasons why this is such a shitty assignment:

1. The wording is fucking garbage.

   To complete this assignment, you need a minimum something to write in red and blue and a crayon. To save time, just get a red and blue crayon. Now pick one to measure with and circle the shitty clip art appropriately. But wait? Do you circle based on the crayon you’re using or the crayon you’ve set aside to measure with? Do you measure from bumper to bumper or from roof to wheel? What about the angled images; do you measure them with along their axis or in reference to an axis you create or in reference to a typical 90 degree Cartesian coordinate plane axis? What if you just hate crayons and want to use some other writing utensils that are in blue and red to circle and draw with? Okay, that’s fine, but you need at least two writing utensils of variant type that write in blue and red respectively, and you still need a fucking crayon. But wait, what if you don’t have any crayons? Now you have to go buy some crayons, which are stupidly expensive despite being nothing more than birthday candles with no wicks just to finish a goddamn third grade homework assignment. What a load of ass.

2. The medium used for measurement is subjective.

   Now that you have your crayon, put it on the damn paper and figure out what is bigger than it and what is smaller than it. It might be hard because whomever designed the sheet is using Microsoft Word 97 and figured out how to re-size pictures, so you might need to adjust your eyes to all the blurry lines which add length to the buses. So, you begin to circle when something hits you: what if, during the course of this assignment, your crayon breaks or you wear it down so much that it becomes smaller than what you’ve circled red in the case you’re using the crayons to do the work? What if you don’t have any crayons shorter than any of the images and, conversely, what if you have no crayons longer than the images? You might say this is ridiculous, but if you’re a kid in second grade learning this, you probably use crayons a ton and most of them are little nubs stuck at the bottom of your box. Okay, so just pick a new crayon and continue on, you think, which is a great solution except for one little detail: the new crayon isn’t the same size as the first crayon. Even worse, if you switch crayons in the middle of the assignment, you need to go back and remeasure, which is an unnecessary hassle for such an easy assignment. Doing this also highlights the key problem with this bullshit assignment

3. There is no point of failure.

   When you bring this back in tomorrow, you and your friends will talk about the assignment, and this is totally natural. None of you are going to remember which crayon or crayons you used because you have no reason to. You’re then all going to compare your work and are going to realize that nobody has the same fucking answer. This is the fatal flaw of the assignment. There is no objective baseline to measure against when the assignment is being graded because the frame of reference is going to differ student by student yet the teacher won’t have access to that frame of reference. You’re going to have sheets that are all blue or all red and drawings that won’t make any sense unless the students have purposefully picked things that are demonstrably bigger or smaller than the crayon. Good luck with that similarly sized part because, again, it’s ungradeable without a proper point of reference. At the end of the day, all the kids get full marks and they all pass on to the next grade while learning nothing about what in the hell units actually are.

The worst part is that this assignment to be remedied very simply: pick one car and use that as the baseline, then reword the instructions so that students measure in one specific direction relevant to the base car and apply that to all the other images/drawings. Better yet, instead of using some random object to measure with, write in the instructions to grab a fucking ruler and have the students actually measure the goddamn cars. For an even more complete experience, have them use a ruler that has inches and centimeters and have them measure in both so that they’ll understand the real purpose behind units.

Next up is something that set me off as both someone who loves writing & language and someone who loves math and the offshoots borne of math:

Number sentences?

You can tell the system was created by someone who received solid F’s in math and English classes because nobody who passed those classes would invent a statement like ‘number sentences’ which turns a single word into two, thus complicating the matter, and equates two entirely different words. Since I know people aren’t going to click those links, the reason ‘number sentence’ is awful is because it implies that an equation is equal to a sentence, just instead of using words, it uses numbers. This is incorrect as an equation is statement that uses axiomatic operations. A sentence is a result of words being strung together such that they meet the necessary criteria to create a sentence, but does not involve axiomatic operations. A sentence also can’t be written in reverse, whereas an equation can, which means an equation cannot, by definition, be a sentence of numbers.

This assignment also uses something called the ‘double fact’, which is another made-up term that, again, complicates the problem far more than it needs to be; I’m in grad school for engineering and this even confuses me. Not that that’s hard to do, but this crap is designed for grade school kids. It should not be a fucking project to understand what’s being asked. What I assume that is meant by ‘double fact’ is the idea that the blank is supposed to be a number that can be composed out of a double of some number. This would be great, as it’s an implicit lesson on multiplication, but you have to then explain this ‘double fact’ that helps you solve a ‘double plus one’. What in the fuck does that even mean to a kid in grade school?

It also doesn’t even work if you do it the way the sheet wants you. Take the 3 + 4 = 7 box. To make that ‘double plus one’ work, you would need to understand decimals and fractions, which isn’t dealt with until after you understand orders of magnitude and multiplication/division. In whole numbers, the double of four is two. Of course, that’s if you’re working under the assumption that the ‘double fact’ is supposed to be some number added to itself is the ‘double’. Thanks to the lack of clarity, this can easily be misconstrued as the double of four is eight, which won’t make that equation work. The stupid card exercise in the middle is even worse because the ‘double plus one’ idea only works for three of the eight boxes. Couple that with the idea I introduced earlier that you can easily think the double of four is either two or eight depending on how you interpret the problem, the poor kid working the ‘exercise’ is just drawing lines wherever. There’s no way these kids will do well on this material when you’re using methods that are basically short cuts that certain people have memorized to help do the actual math, which is not something we should be teaching kids until they get the goddamn basics down. Even worse, the exercise has useless information in it, which is just going to confuse these kids even more since they won’t know what is important and what isn’t. Adding in useless information is fine AFTER you cover the important information, not while you’re doing it.

Here’s another gem:

Does anybody even proof-read this shit?

This one is all over the place. The font is different sizes, some of the writing is squished, there’s double spaces all over the place, it’s not justified. The language is, again, confusing, as it implies they’re eating from the same pizzas yet there are two separate cheese pizzas based on the wording. Yet again, they invent a nonsense phrase, this one being ‘mathematical thinking’. You can’t show thinking, you morons, because it’s thought. By definition, it’s something that happens in your head, which is abstract in concept and in practice because thoughts have no physical form. What you mean to say is ‘show all your work’, but because you’re too stupid to understand basic words, you’ve yet again made the problem make less sense and have complicated it. The sentence ‘all the pizzas were the same size’ is also completely useless because it gives us the measurements of what each guy ate, so we’re meant to work in fractions; way to waste time and ink.

It’s sad because aside from all the distractions, this problem is fairly straight-forward and really easy regarding the mathematical side. If you wanted to play devil’s advocate linguistically, Tito had more pizza because he ate more kinds of pizza, which makes both statements correct. However, since this is the math section, Luis wins. Unfortunately, we all lose because we have to solve a shitty problem that talks about boring kinds of pizza, and these two imaginary fuckers ordered two separate cheese pizzas. Just finish the first one, you dolts.

Found the guy who failed out of college!

This one is fucking inexcusable and beyond atrocious. This one implies the distance formula, which looks like this:

However, since the y-coordinates are the same, you only have to deal with the x-coordinates. That’s all fine and dandy, and simplifies the formula, but why on god’s green Earth do the answers use the absolute number operation? Just use the goddamn distance formula because you’re going to ask the same damn question later on using different points, and kids are going to be trying to look for a bullshit loophole like this when they should just be learning the proper formulas. Also, there are no units anywhere. None. I can’t believe I found two problems that don’t know what the hell the word ‘units’ means.

Another great one:

My sides.

‘Divide both sides by 2/3’? Who the fuck divides by fractions? The answer is nobody because nobody worth even a tenth of a damn is stupid enough to make a simple problem more complicated and cluttered. I pulled this from here, which I guess is an entire blog centered around how shitty the Common Core’s math problems are. I didn’t even know that the Common Core was based around the idea that a student is supposed to figure out what method they want to use to solve a problem. That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. It undermines what mathematics is (statements based on logical axioms) and it sets up every student to fail because it’s making the assumption that an equation can be solved in more than one way. You can solve a problem in more than one way, but you can’t solve an equation in more than one way. That’s a bit confusing, but what I’m really saying is that there are multiple ways to get the value of one-hundred seventy-eight listed in the problem. There is only one way to solve that equation (multiply by three, divide by two, subtract fifty-seven). To create a new method means creating a whole new equation, which would be fine if the point of the Common Core was to test a student’s ability to create, not a student’s ability to manipulate equations properly.

Solve the equations, you half-wit, not ‘make true equations’. What are you, some fucking ogre? Also, ‘4 hundredth’ and ‘1 tenths’? Unreal.

Here’s one that I’m not sure is a Common Core question, but it comes from a Canadian history text book from 2003 and I had to include it:

We live just south of you, just ask us you dolts.

There is so much wrong with this one. The colonies were the freest until the end of the Seven Years War. This was because Great Britain decided to quarter a good chunk of their soldiers who fought in the campaign that occurred in North America because it was much easier than sending boats to get them back. The Colonists didn’t like this because the soldiers simply took over their residences and essentially threatened violence if the Colonists didn’t comply. Additionally, since they had to pay these butthole soldiers for being soldiers, they taxed the colonies because why the hell not? I mean, your soldiers already live there and these guys have no representation in your government, so it only makes sense to step on them even more and take more of their stuff.

While I’m being a bit jestful here, it’s important to note that a large chunk of the fighting during the Seven Years War on the North American continent was supplied and done by the Colonies. It’s also important to note that no serious historian would ever consider the American Revolution to be a ‘civil war’ between people who wanted the crown to rule and people who didn’t. The American Revolution was caused by Great Britain taxing the very people it sent to explore the Americas and find them new trade material and routes. The modern equivalent would be if you had a job, did work for your group and then you paid them for you doing the work you did for them. You also can’t complain because you aren’t represented by Human Resources, either.

Here’s the last one I can handle. If I keep going at this, I’ll never stop, and at some point my brain will melt from the unending idiocy:

All of my what.

First, why are there circles of something being compared to a cup with the number six on it described as ‘whole’? Is that cup made out of those circles and it takes six of those circles to make up the cup? Is the six referring to how many circles are inside the cup? Wouldn’t you then have no parts missing since they’re all inside the cup? Someone, please help me out, I have no idea what the fuck this graphic is supposed to explain. The answer is two, because this is a subtraction problem. You wouldn’t have guessed that from the wording and pictures, however, because the people who make these problems are certifiably insane.

Next, those are fucking cubes inside a rectangle split in half vertically with a dimension of 8 across the full width. I can’t get over this. THERE IS A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE HOLDING MULTIPLE THREE DIMENSIONAL SHAPES. WHAT SORCERY IS THIS? ALSO, WHY ARE THOSE JARS CUBES?

In the third problem we need to use cubes to solve it. Then the problem describes purses. How do I solve this problem with cubes? Better yet, why the fuck do I need to use cubes? Why can’t I just solve this via the purses? Is this problem some kind of covert operation to teach young children that the world is full of middle-men that add unnecessary complexity to easy problems and that you just have to deal with them? Also, what fucking story did you read in the history of ever that ended by asking you a question? I sure haven’t read any like that, and I don’t mean stories that have driven me to think, I mean stories that straight up with the last sentence being a question. And again, they use ‘number sentence’. It’s not a goddamn sentence, it’s an equation. Go back to fucking school and learn real words and real math.

Fourth, how did this teacher get 45% out of two wrong answers? The correct percentage should be 50%. It’s still an F, but how can the one doing the teaching get the math wrong? Yes, I know at the bottom of the sheet it says ‘1 of 2’, but that brings up another stellar point: One of two what? It says ‘Topic 2’ next to that little circle, so is that saying there are two pages to the topic or two topics and it’s mislabeled? The score is hovering on the name space, so is the student’s name 45%? What the fuck is the ‘6x’ in the upper right hand corner for? I assumed those were the incorrect problems, which means that the total number of problems is eleven. Ironically, figuring that out would’ve been a great math problem involving proportions, but instead, these unlike hooligan children are forced to stare at circles and cups with the number six on them. Also, what the fuck do you mean ‘best answer’? This isn’t an open-ended essay, this is math. There is no ‘best answer’. There’s only a ‘correct answer’; stop improperly supplementing words just to avoid absolutes, you clods.

Finally, I need to address something that has nothing to do with the Common Core but with teaching in general. Because I have so many friends who are aiming to be teachers, I consistently see the papers marked up like this one. What in the hell happened to cross marks on wrong answers? Why are they circled? Has our society become so emotionally weak that we cannot stand to see a cross mark the indicate we have failed at comprehending something? If it’s wrong, put a goddamn X across it. Also, circle the correct answer, you shitty teacher. You haven’t marked this student’s paper so this student will never know what the correct answer is and they won’t be able to do forensic analysis on their own work thanks to your half-assed job. I’m sure they covered it in class, but stuff like this shouldn’t take time out of a lecture.

Even worse, this isn’t just a young kids problem, it’s one all the way up through college. Too many teachers and teacher assistants simply mark a problem wrong or subtract points, and students are left guessing where they fucked up. At least leave some goddamn breadcrumbs; nobody should be forced to do an entire problem over again because of what might just be a simple sign error, and teachers shouldn’t have to take up lecture time to cover the test. Leave breadcrumbs so the students can learn how to solve problems and fix their mistakes and so that the students can come to you and ask for help. I’ve heard from so many college professors that students ‘never use the office hours’. No shit. When you don’t point out where they went wrong and then take up lecture time explaining the general way of how to solve the problem and not going into detail, you’re wasting everyone’s time and forcing the students to take more time out of their day to retrace their steps ad nauseum. Fuck you.

I’m going to go sniff a pool full of paint, because that’s the only way I’ll ever be able to understand how this trash not only gets made, but gets published for learning eyes and learning minds. Fuck the Common Core.

Edit: I spent some more time looking up these ridiculous Common Core examples, and I think I may have found the best one:

I spent a solid ten minutes laughing at this one. It’s pretty evident that the kid who handed this in realized that this is bullshit and couldn’t subject himself to it anymore, and is perfectly intelligent enough to actually solve these ‘problems’. What’s even funnier than that is how the sheet is trying to turn equations into analogies and make even more work for the students rather than have them just solve the goddamn equations. What’s even funnier on top of this is the comment made by the teacher about ‘friendly numbers’. It’s funny just on its own since numbers and equations don’t have any sort of identity other than being numbers and equations and they cannot hold qualities like friendliness. However, if you think about it, what the teacher is implying is that she/he doesn’t like to deal with numbers in equations that aren’t stupidly easy to deal with, like straight hundreds. Or, if we assume the worse, the teacher is of the same intelligence as those who wrote the sheet and is too dumb to do the simple subtraction of two-hundred twenty and one-hundred ninety and, instead must add ten to both values so that one becomes a flat hundred value.

I also found this article that was written by a mathematics professor at University of Wisconsin Jordan Ellenberg. Apparently, this guys is a math world superstar; I wouldn’t know this because I’m not that in tune with math world superstars, but it’s probably more likely to the fact that I don’t pay attention to people who have Fine Arts degrees in creative writing because I don’t want to listen to the opinions of someone stupid enough to spend a sack of money to get a ‘degree’ in something that is a hobby, especially someone who, for a writer by profession, degree and trade, cannot properly use those learned skills to write grammatically correct statements and avoid sentence fragments.

I won’t go at the article in full detail like I normally would, but I will highlight a few bits I enjoyed. One of them was the constant mention of his book. I like how when someone puts out a book, there’s usually a ton of humble bragging about it, as if they wrote something truly worthy of being read or truly worthy of renting mental capacity. The vast majority of books are garbage, and very rarely are they good enough to make throngs of people contemplate their message and meaning. Ironically, most of these books have already been written, whereas books written by modern authors are not. That’s a bit of a sweeping generalization, but considering how popular Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey are along with the entire trash heap that is Dean Koontz, I’d say I’m fairly justified in making a blanket statement like that.

He also goes on about number sentences, which he favors and says they make perfect sense. It should go without saying that I was surprised at the very least. In fact, the rest of the post is about his praise of number sentences and a heap of false equivalencies he attempts to make so that we might be able to understand why they created the phrase in the Common Core lessons.

I’ve already explained why this does not work linguistically, but I think I should explain why the entire idea of trying to equate mathematics into English equivalencies is an incredibly ass-backward idea. Mathematics is its own language. In order to be good at mathematics, you need to understand the basics that make up the language so that you are able to converse with other mathematicians. You don’t run up and start speaking English to someone who only speaks French and then get mad when they don’t answer in English, so why are we doing this for Mathematics?

Here’s a quote from the article:

When we call 2 + 3 = 5 a “sentence” we engage in the radical act of insisting that mathematics has meaning. That shouldn’t be a radical act. But, too often, we teach our students that “doing mathematics” means “manipulating clusters of digits according to rules presented to us by the teacher.”

That’s not math. And when we teach our students to do that, and only that, we are training them to be slow, buggy versions of Excel. What’s the point?

Mathematics is manipulating clusters of digits, you fathead. That’s precisely what it is and how it’s defined. How are you a mathematician? You should know that math is, as I’ve said numerous times in this already, based on axioms. Just because you think we need to embrace poor writing doesn’t make it a good idea. If you’re point is that we don’t focus enough on the ‘behind-the-scenes’, then start teaching that shit and stop trying to stuff the language of math into the language of English. It doesn’t work like that.

Another:

If a student doesn’t truly grasp that “2 + 3 = 5” is a sentence, a statement about the world that might be true or false, it’s hard to see how, when algebra comes around, they can grasp that

x^2 + 3 = 5

is a sentence, too, one which is true for precisely two values of x (namely, the positive and negative square roots of 2) and false for all the rest.

Exactly. Stating that an equation is a sentence leads to garbage like this that implies an equation can have multiple meanings. It can’t. An equation can have multiple solutions, but it can’t ever have multiple meanings because it doesn’t mean anything. It just is. Similarly, a sentence can’t have multiple solutions because that’s not what a sentence is or does. A sentence may construct a larger body of writing just like an equation constructs a larger body of a solution, but they cannot equate because they do fundamentally different things and are constructed fundamentally differently.

And the last one:

One solution, of course, is to double down, addressing algebra, too, in a purely algorithmic way. You have an equation involving x, certain modifications of the equation are allowed (because the teacher says they’re allowed) and when you get to something that has just “x =” on the other side, you’ve won the game. If you can do this, you can get an A on a typical algebra test. But can you do algebra? I’m not so sure.

In order to get that A, you had to do algebra. You wouldn’t be able to get the A without doing algebra in a class about algebra. I am at a loss for words, and must now go ponder why such a great university would employ such a brainless wit.