New Math for Grown-Ups

Math can be hard. But, it can also be useful in so many areas of our everyday lives: calculating the total cost of groceries, fitting a car into a tight parking spot, figuring out how much time our kids have to get ready and be out the door on time, helping our kids with their homework, and more.For some reason, the math on our kids' homework doesn't look like the math we remember from school. How have they managed to change math?I was as surprised as anyone else that math has changed...
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Math can be hard. But, it can also be useful in so many areas of our everyday lives: calculating the total cost of groceries, fitting a car into a tight parking spot, figuring out how much time our kids have to get ready and be out the door on time, helping our kids with their homework, and more.For some reason, the math on our kids' homework doesn't look like the math we remember from school. How have they managed to change math?I was as surprised as anyone else that math has changed so much, and that there are actually good reasons for it! The "New Math", as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and similar standards are often described, is designed to help kids develop a better sense of how math really works. Rather than memorizing times tables, kids are now learning what multiplication means and how they can multiply one-digit, two-digit, and even larger numbers mentally, without writing it out or using a calculator. Rather than memorizing the names of numbers from 1-100, kids are now learning that our number system is a pattern of 0-9 that repeats for every 10, so that counting from 10-19 looks a lot like counting from 80-89 and even 450-459!As grownups, we know a lot of this stuff. But we probably had to figure it out on our own. Sometimes, it took a long time before the concepts "clicked". The "New Math" is an attempt to standardize the "clicking", the internal sense of how stuff works and how specific math rules can be extended and applied to other situations. This can look baffling on paper. You'll see rules, words, and tools you've never seen before. I'm here to interpret all of that for you. I'm hoping to provide a user-friendly guidebook to the "New Math", so you know what's going on, how it connects to what you already know, what your kid needs to do with it, and why they're learning it this way. And most importantly, so you can learn how to confidently help them with their homework.