Guest blogger, Roy, on Common Core math problem

COMPLEX LANGUAGE WARNING: you have to learn the extra baggage of the fixed linguistic element "make 10" to be able to carry out the task. Isn't it a lot simpler to just teach that 8 + 5 _is_ 13? I haven't heard of any really good pedagogical reason for not just taking the easy path in answering such single digit questions, at least. Old school for me meant that a lot of life is simplified by just learning some things by rote. Most people are born with 20 digits-- it makes sense to learn by heart without looking what you could count out from the top and bottom on your hands and toes. Depending on whether your language reads from left to right or right to left and top to bottom or bottom to top, one could learn one's digits in order (assigning each a fixed number between 1 and 20) and have a visual backup for that stuff in one's mind at all times.

In my opinion as someone who at one time started on the road to be a linguist, has studied a good deal of philosophy and managed a graduate theological degree, this the pictured method in the meme above is illustrative of a veiled attempt to take all of education and turn it into something, where the _learning_ process becomes the focus (rather than _reality & objectivity_ and how to distinguish (it's really "all the same" they say)) those two.The rotation of that procedural complex(and its implicitly, for outsider's-- at least, incomprehensible language, laden with new technical terminata) has the explicit, but hidden goal of absolutely taking someone two generations away completely out of the communicative process. Now you add the pubescent storming away from logical reasoning as to why some activity shouldn't take place at the moment while yelling "You don't want to understand me because you hate me." to several levels of "I'm not really sure I really did understand what he was asking, but the way I answered was formed with the goal of engendering understanding-- it seems she doesn't want to be understood" The left wants equal outcomes for everybody. The only way they suggest to get there is to replace meaning with feelings in verbal intercourse and make government bigger. Ergo, everybody has to get dumber and poorer.

Mathematical question for budding statisticians: Is the last sentence of the preceding paragraph a betterment or degradation for society?