Here are the Grade 1 Common Core standards for math:
Operations and algebraic thinking
• represent and solve problems involving addition and subtraction.
• understand and apply properties of operations and the relationship between addition and subtraction.
• add and subtract within 20.
• Work with addition and subtraction equations.
Number and operations in Base ten
• extend the counting sequence.
• Understand place value.
• Use place value understanding and properties of operations to add and subtract.
Measurement and data
• measure lengths indirectly and by iterating length units.
• tell and write time.
• represent and interpret data.
Geometry
• reason with shapes and their attributes.
Mathematical Practices
1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

Operations and algebraic thinking 1.oa
Represent and solve problems involving addition and subtraction.
1. Use addition and subtraction within 20 to solve word problems involving situations of adding to, taking from, putting together, taking apart, and comparing, with unknowns in all positions, e.g., by using objects, drawings, and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.2
2. Solve word problems that call for addition of three whole numbers whose sum is less than or equal to 20, e.g., by using objects, drawings, and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.

Understand and apply properties of operations and the relationship between addition and subtraction.
3. Apply properties of operations as strategies to add and subtract.3 Examples: If 8 + 3 = 11 is known, then 3 + 8 = 11 is also known. (Commutative property of addition.) To add 2 + 6 + 4, the second two numbers can be added to make a ten, so 2 + 6 + 4 = 2 + 10 = 12. (Associative property of addition.)
4. Understand subtraction as an unknown-addend problem. For example, subtract 10 – 8 by finding the number that makes 10 when added to 8.

Add and subtract within 20.
5. Relate counting to addition and subtraction (e.g., by counting on 2 to add 2).
6. Add and subtract within 20, demonstrating fluency for addition and subtraction within 10. Use strategies such as counting on; making ten (e.g., 8 + 6 = 8 + 2 + 4 = 10 + 4 = 14); decomposing a number leading to a ten (e.g., 13 – 4 = 13 – 3 – 1 = 10 – 1 = 9); using the relationship between addition and subtraction (e.g., knowing that 8 + 4 = 12, one knows 12 – 8 = 4); and creating equivalent but easier or known sums (e.g., adding 6 + 7 by creating the known equivalent 6 + 6 + 1 = 12 + 1 = 13).

Work with addition and subtraction equations.
7. Understand the meaning of the equal sign, and determine if equations involving addition and subtraction are true or false. For example, which of the following equations are true and which are false? 6 = 6, 7 = 8 – 1, 5 + 2 = 2 + 5, 4 + 1 = 5 + 2.
8. Determine the unknown whole number in an addition or subtraction equation relating to three whole numbers. For example, determine the unknown number that makes the equation true in each of the equations 8 + ? = 11, 5 = 􀃍 – 3, 6 + 6 = 􀃍.

Number and Operations in Base Ten 1.NBT
Extend the counting sequence.
1. Count to 120, starting at any number less than 120. In this range, read and write numerals and represent a number of objects with a written numeral.

Understand place value.
2. Understand that the two digits of a two-digit number represent amounts of tens and ones. Understand the following as special cases:
a. 10 can be thought of as a bundle of ten ones — called a “ten.”
b. The numbers from 11 to 19 are composed of a ten and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine ones.
c. The numbers 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 refer to one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine tens (and 0 ones).

2 See Glossary, Table 1.
3 Students need not use formal terms for these properties.
3. Compare two two-digit numbers based on meanings of the tens and ones digits, recording the results of comparisons with the symbols >, =, and <. Use place value understanding and properties of operations to add and subtract.
4. Add within 100, including adding a two-digit number and a one-digit number, and adding a two-digit number and a multiple of 10, using concrete models or drawings and strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction; relate the strategy to a written method and explain the reasoning used. Understand that in adding two-digit numbers, one adds tens and tens, ones and ones; and sometimes it is necessary to compose a ten.
5. Given a two-digit number, mentally find 10 more or 10 less than the number, without having to count; explain the reasoning used.
6. Subtract multiples of 10 in the range 10-90 from multiples of 10 in the range 10-90 (positive or zero differences), using concrete models or drawings and strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction; relate the strategy to a written method and explain the reasoning used.

Measurement and Data 1.MD
Measure lengths indirectly and by iterating length units.
1. Order three objects by length; compare the lengths of two objects indirectly by using a third object.
2. Express the length of an object as a whole number of length units, by laying multiple copies of a shorter object (the length unit) end to end; understand that the length measurement of an object is the number of same-size length units that span it with no gaps or overlaps. Limit to contexts where the object being measured is spanned by a whole number of length units with no gaps or overlaps.

Tell and write time.
3. Tell and write time in hours and half-hours using analog and digital clocks.

Represent and interpret data.
4. Organize, represent, and interpret data with up to three categories; ask and answer questions about the total number of data points, how many in each category, and how many more or less are in one category than in another.

Geometry 1.G
Reason with shapes and their attributes.
1. Distinguish between defining attributes (e.g., triangles are closed and three-sided) versus non-defining attributes (e.g., color, orientation, overall size); build and draw shapes to possess defining attributes.
2. Compose two-dimensional shapes (rectangles, squares, trapezoids, triangles, half-circles, and quarter-circles) or three-dimensional shapes (cubes, right rectangular prisms, right circular cones, and right circular cylinders) to create a composite shape, and compose new shapes from the composite shape.4
3. Partition circles and rectangles into two and four equal shares, describe the shares using the words halves, fourths, and quarters, and use the phrases half of, fourth of, and quarter of. Describe the whole as two of, or four of the shares. Understand for these examples that decomposing into more equal shares creates smaller shares.

4Students do not need to learn formal names such as “right rectangular prism.”

Eduhonesty: Ummm… these kids are six years old, guys. Some may even be five in states with December cut-off dates. They still believe in the tooth fairy. In Jean Piaget’s terms, these children are mostly all preoperational thinkers. Readers who don’t know Piaget might want to take time to look up his breakdown of childhood development stages.

I think these standards are batshit crazy.

I have to share this snippet. I was talking to an elderly French teacher last night about parents and grades. She gave a “C” to a girl some years back, a “C” that honestly reflected the girls effort and understanding in that teacher’s view.

The girl’s dad came to the private school where this teacher taught and told her, “If you don’t change that grade to an ‘A,’ I am going to sue you.”

The teacher changed the grade. I would have done the same. Some levels of crazy just aren’t worth dealing with.

Even the suggestion of implementing year-round education naturally hits a wall in many communities. Where I live, the schools are working well. Most graduates will go to college and will be ready for college coursework. We crank out National Merit Finalists and Ivy League attendees.

Summers are exciting times in many households. Kids go off to camp or on fun family vacations. So revising the traditional nine-month agrarian calendar into a year-round calendar, allowing for more-continuous education with a shorter summer vacation and more frequent breaks during the periods of instruction — well, that mostly does not go over well with my neighbors. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, they’d say.

When I advocate for a longer school year, I recognize I am going up against formidable forces. Our problem is not that American education doesn’t work, our problem is that American education works much better in some locations than others — and the people who make American policy tend to live in districts with good schools. Reforming educational funding to create longer school years for disadvantaged children will not personally help these policymakers, except in the most abstract sense. In fact, reform will most likely take resources away from the districts in which they live.

Eduhonesty: In a nutshell, the people who decide educational policy live in areas with high-quality schools, areas that tend to have money. But that results in a real disincentive to reform educational funding. I think many test-based solutions to America’s educational ills may have been spawned directly from attempts to avoid touching our property-tax based funding system. For our leaders, it ain’t broke so maybe some of them would rather not fix it.

I don’t know how to push funding reform to the front of America’s school discussions. For one thing, testing and the Common Core have provided a huge distraction. I am certain, though, that we need to get school-funding reform off the academic backburner.

Zip code should not be destiny.

In many zip codes, America’s educational system appears to be broke, broken, brokest. Kids in those zip codes can’t afford summer learning loss. Students in our weakest districts are already behind in school and the evidence suggests they fall farther behind their counterparts in academically-stronger districts over summer vacation. I have already advocated for a longer school year for our lower-functioning students to give those students a chance to catch up. If districts contend they can’t afford that longer school year, given our school funding set-up, then we can at least diminish summer learning loss.

Two types of year-round calendars exist, single track and multitrack. The latter can be used to manage school overcrowding, when student populations have expanded beyond use of local facilities. I’d like to look at the single track option, which offers a more balanced calendar year with more continuous instruction. Simply, we shorten the long summer vacation by distributing vacation days throughout the school year, creating periods called “intersessions.” Ideally, intersessions can be used for tutoring, remediation and enrichment, allowing students who need or want extra help to attend targeted instruction during an intersession. Single-track calendars vary, but common formats are 45-15, 60-20 and 90-30. Students attend school for 45 days, for example, and then have a 15 day break or intersession. The school year in this scenario still nets out to 180 days, but without that long summer period that leads to forgetfulness in many students.

Eduhonesty: In an ideal universe, we would reform funding so that schools could be kept open for tutoring and remediation during the intersession. Intersessions could be used to provide the extra instruction necessary to help students who have fallen behind, returning those students to grade level.

If the reading skills are not there, those skills must be taught. If districts are going to insist on filling up all instructional hours with canned, Common Core-based instruction, we will have to find more time somewhere — the time to do the essential reading instruction without which academic success eventually becomes impossible.

Please see my April 13, 2015 post.

I’d like to ask readers to please pass my last post along. I think the longer school year may be our last, best hope for education in America. That idea needs to be circulated.

My last post contains an interactive school report card for the schools in Illinois. I want to share one more site: http://iirc.niu.edu/Classic/Default.aspx. This older site contains more information readers might want to review. I like the graphs.

In some high schools, half or more of all students are still leaving high school before graduation. According to the online Illinois report card (http://www.illinoisreportcard.com/School.aspx?schoolId=150162990250616), only 44% of the students at Manley Career Academy High School graduated within four years. Manley is not alone. Only 54% graduated from Fenger Academy High School, 41% from Robeson High School and 45% from Chicago Virtual Charter School. Interested readers can go to https://illinoisreportcard.com/default.aspx and look at Chicago schools, a number of which are admittedly doing well.

Have we made progress? Without question, graduation rates have been rising in Chicago and throughout the country. If some alarms are being raised about the college-readiness of many of America’s graduates, we are nonetheless preventing students from walking out the door without their diploma.

Here’s the scary part, though. Schools are trying desperately to raise those bars, the bars that indicate annual state test scores and percentage of students graduating from high school. There are substantial Federal and State penalties for failing to raise the bars. Yet many of the bars are not budging or are climbing in small spurts. In fact, despite threats as big as the dissolution of a school district, some of those bars have fallen.

Why does this happen?

Eduhonesty: Obviously I can’t toss off the answer to the above question in one compact paragraph. I believe I have laid down one of the biggest questions in education today. Why can’t we push those bars higher?

I would like to add my inflammatory 2 cents here. I believe the bars remain resistant to our efforts in part because of our inability to face up to a large truth: These kids can’t catch up if they have the same school year as their academically-stronger counterparts. In fact, according to https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-education-and-poverty-america, “By the end of the 4th grade, African-American, Hispanic and low-income students are already 2 years behind grade level. By the time they reach the 12th grade they are 4 years behind.”

I haven’t backtracked to find the study that DoSomething.org used, but I readily believe their numbers. For one thing, academically-lower students normally enter school with fewer vocabulary words at their disposal, sometimes thousands fewer words. The research indicates the vocabulary gap widens with time.

If we want to help the kids at the bottom, I believe we need to rethink the standard 180-day school year. A child who has fallen two-thousand words behind the average student of his or her age needs to learn those missing words quickly. We’ll have to reform school funding to make my idea work, but I would add an extra month or more to that child’s school year, along with an afterschool childcare program that provides snacks and rest, but also extra tutoring during the afternoon.

In my opinion, our kids at the bottom will never catch up any other way. We can’t work that much smarter during our 180-day years, not enough to fill in the gaps, so we will have to work longer. No other option exists. Currently, while teachers are filling in language-learning gaps for vocabulary-poor students, their vocabulary-enriched counterparts are also reading and working on academics, often at a naturally faster rate due to the advantages provided by those expanded vocabularies. That fact alone explains why desperate efforts to help kids who have fallen two years behind may end with those kids eventually falling a full four years behind. Kids who have tumbled four years below grade level often leave school early. School makes many of them feel stupid.

We can fix that for many kids. To give those kids the academic successes they need, though, we will have to provide them with the instructional time they need — which might be 240 days instead of 180 days. We talk about differentiation of instruction all the time. We ought to try practicing what we preach on a macro level. The one-school-year-fits-all from America’s farming past should be replaced by a model that allows more time and instruction in our academic wastelands, those sad zip codes where extra days and afternoons might give kids a realistic chance to catch up.

(For new teachers and anyone else who is interested.)

Sometimes today with our preplanned lessons and scripted curricula, we find ourselves breathlessly short of time. May I suggest you free a few non-curricular minutes? Character really does count. Historically, teachers took time for more than math and English. You should too. Do what you have to do. Skip an opening activity if you must or make an exit ticket that does necessarily include academics.

The exact life lesson you present will often be determined by circumstances. When a stapler disappears, that’s the week for the anti-theft lesson. When Joy curses out Miranda, that’s a fine day to present the Captain America language lesson. What did Captain America mean when he said “language”? Why do you think he said that? Does the language you use with friends matter? Does the language you use in class matter? Why? You can find character-building activities on the internet when you do not have time to make your own.

If you are in middle-school or high-school, you might want to share some of what you have been learning in professional development. That Carol Dweck growth mindset idea deserves a full explanation, for example. You might combine your subject matter with a PowerPoint on predictors used to anticipate student drop-outs. That PowerPoint may hammer home why students should not slack off in school in a way that short classroom reminders cannot. Kids benefit from hearing about the big picture. They also enjoy an escape from academic minutiae.

Eduhonesty: Schools are now often preplanning any whole child education during tutoring or RtI periods. Those tutoring moments are fine as far as they go, but they seldom work as well as taking advantage of the “right” moment. Joy’s outburst may be the perfect first act in the play that will be your (bad) language lesson.

Carpe diem.

(A post for new teachers and other interested parties.)

Oregon school pumpkin carving party suspected in norovirus outbreak

From the article “Help for Homework Help: Teaching Parents Common Core Math,” by Michelle R. Smith, Associated Press, I offer the following food for thought:

Any adult who has tried to help a second-grader with homework has noticed math is not what it used to be. Now schools are unlocking the secrets of Common Core math for mystified parents.

They’re holding special classes or giving out materials designed for adults so they can help children with their math homework. After parents learn the strategies, educators say, they’re more willing to get on board with Common Core math amid criticism from some politicians, from fellow parents, on social media and from celebrities like Louis C.K., who complained Common Core math made his daughters cry.

…

Eduhonesty: So now we are tutoring the parents. Damn it all, this is getting so crazy. When you invent a system America’s parents cannot do without special, outside tutoring, how is this supposed to work? Did anyone coming up with latest version of the new math stop to think about the implications of introducing a system of mathematics that parents could not understand? Who did they think would help kids with homework?

I feel compelled to note that the Common Core math seems again to favor the fortunate. Stay-at-home moms can fit in tutoring easily. Couples with money to afford sitters can set aside tutoring time. Single-parents, with or without jobs, will be at a serious disadvantage. Parents who were successful at math while in school are likely to take a whack at learning this latest math. Parents who struggled with math will more likely opt out of tutoring, fearing embarrassment and perhaps having to confess to their kids that they don’t get the Common Core math either.

Honest, the old math worked. I used it to brute force my way through two-thirds of an analytic geometry textbook in one day — admittedly without understanding the fine points —  when a community college refused to give me an extension on a self-paced class I had been ignoring. (I got a B.) That math got Neil Armstrong to the moon.

Common sense has fled these lands, I fear.