[ExI] common core educations standards, was: RE: far future

[Mike Dougherty]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 3:01 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 5:42 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
>> “Tyler made 36 total snowflakes which is a multiple of how triangular
>> snowflakes he made. How many triangular snowflakes could he have made?”
>>
>> Did ya get it?   {8-]  They have a funny backhanded way of asking
>> questions.
>>
>
> I see the missing word.  ;)
>
> As to the math part: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, or 36.  It's a factoring
> question.
>
>
I'm interested in the backstory where Tyler has the nano-fabber capable of
making snowflakes of arbitrary sidedness.

this is also another example of why non-math people 'dislike math' - the
question should be:  what are the factors of 36.  The introduction of
"Tyler" and "snowflakes" and "triangular" and all the nonsense is just
confusing distraction.  Once the math principles are understood, the
application of those principles really would be better understood in an
interactive data analysis.  I feel like we're assuming children are too
stupid to do so-called "big data" analysis in 4th grade.  I also feel like
the right teacher would make that fun.  Instead we hire data scientists
(applied-math geeks?) to do it for us.

I'm not really sure what are the goals of "common core"
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