I Asked a Teacher: Is There Any Benefit to Teaching Only Common Core Math?
The homework folder came home like it always does on Tuesdays, stuffed with a fluency sheet and a problem about a farmer’s market. My daughter, seven, sat down at the kitchen table with a pencil and an eraser already worn down to a nub. The first problem asked her to solve 7 + 6 by using a number bond. She drew two circles, wrote the 7 and the 6, and then made a smaller circle in the middle for the total. I recognized the layout from her class presentations, but I didn’t really understand it. When I asked why she couldn’t just write 13 vertically, she looked at me with the kind of patient exasperation only children can manage. “You have to show how you broke it apart,” she said.
I remember learning addition the way my grandmother taught my mother: stack the numbers, carry the one, memorize the pattern. It worked. I was fast, accurate, and clueless about why the one was actually a ten. I didn’t think about place value until I was in high school, and even then it was more of a word I knew than a concept I felt. So watching my daughter draw little circles and arrows felt like a different language. I assumed her teacher would understand my frustration, so I sent a message asking if we could talk.
Ms. Alvarez said yes. She’s been teaching second grade for eleven years, and her classroom walls are covered with vocabulary cards and number lines. When we sat down in the tiny plastic chairs, I told her that the number bond looked needlessly complicated. I asked her straight out: do you actually see any benefit in teaching common core math exclusively, without ever switching to the traditional way?
She didn’t hesitate as much as I expected. “Yes, but it’s not about the method being better,” she said. “It’s about the vocabulary and the visual being the same for every kid, every year.” Then she pulled out a stack of her students’ work. The first few pages were messy drawings of ten frames and rekenreks. The later pages had strip diagrams and open number lines. What looked like random doodling to me was actually a carefully sequenced set of tools. Ms. Alvarez explained that when teachers in her district stick with common core representations exclusively, third graders already know what a number bond means. They don’t have to relearn how to show their thinking each time they get a new teacher. The math gets built year after year, not reset.
I thought about that. The benefit of an exclusive approach, in that sense, has less to do with pedagogy and more to do with consistency. If every teacher draws the same kind of visual and uses the same words—total, difference, equal groups—students spend less energy deciphering formats and more energy actually solving problems. It’s like teaching readers to decode using the same phonics chart across grades. Kids don’t have to break the code; they already have the code.
But I still wasn’t convinced. “Doesn’t that mean they only learn one way?” I asked. “What if that one way doesn’t make sense to them?” Ms. Alvarez leaned forward. She said that when she does teach only common core strategies, she isn’t forbidding other methods. She’s just not teaching them as the baseline. Her kids can come up with their own shortcuts, but they have to be able to explain why the shortcut works. The number bond is a stepping stone, not a wall. The benefit for most students, she argued, is that it forces them to slow down. They can’t just slap digits into a column and hope. They have to actually name the parts of the problem.
She showed me my daughter’s quiz from last week. “Krista drew a ten-frame to solve 8 + 5,” she said. “She moved two dots over to the eight, made ten, and then counted the rest. That’s more thinking than I ever did at her age. She knows that 8 + 5 is 13 because 8 plus 2 is 10 plus 3 more is 13. That’s not a memorized fact. That’s a relationship.”
I could see that. Still, I asked the question that nagged me: “But will she ever learn to just carry the one? In fourth grade, or later, kids still need the algorithm.” Ms. Alvarez said yes, they definitely do. But she teaches it after the conceptual work is solid. In many common core classrooms, the standard algorithm comes later—sometimes fourth or fifth grade—not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s seen as a more advanced abstract step. The exclusive period isn’t forever. It’s a phase. She also admitted that her coaching and district training push for a pure common core model for most of the school year, with the expectation that teachers can add other approaches if a student is struggling.
I left the conversation with a strange sense of relief. The conflicting thing about common core math isn’t that it’s wrong; it’s that it’s unfamiliar. As a parent, my instinct is to help my child do the assignment the way I was taught. But when I sat back down with my daughter that night and asked her to teach me the number bond, something shifted. She wasn’t complaining about homework anymore. She was explaining, drawing little arrows, and using words like “decompose” without stumbling. And when she solved the farmer’s market problem by drawing a strip diagram—a long rectangle where she labeled the total and the unknown part—her explanation was clearer than anything I remember saying in elementary school. I understood her thinking because she could show it. That was a benefit I hadn’t considered.
Of course, there are moments when it feels like she’s being asked to write an essay for a math answer. The homework takes longer than it does for kids in other districts. Fluency drills still exist, but they’re mixed in with explanations of why a strategy works. Ms. Alvarez acknowledged that some children, especially those who already have a strong intuitive sense of numbers, can find the constant showing of work tedious. She said she sometimes has to tell those kids, “I know you already know the answer. I need you to show me which picture you would make.” That can be a struggle.
What’s working for us is small adjustments. I stopped telling her to do it her way or my way. Instead, I ask a simple question when she gets stuck: “What would you draw?” If she doesn’t know, she flips back to a common core vocabulary card we now keep on the refrigerator. The card has the words “friends of ten” and a small number bond diagram. Having something to look at helps her anchor herself. I also learned to ask her teacher for a list of the year’s key visual models—ten-frames, close numbers, number lines, and part-part-whole circles. It took three minutes to type out, and it means I’m no longer squinting at her homework like a confused tourist.
The question of whether exclusive common core teaching is better remains unresolved for me. I still think a blend makes sense, and many teachers I’ve talked to quietly agree. But I’ve also seen my daughter explain math in a way I never could at her age. Maybe the benefit isn’t the method itself. Maybe it’s that somebody finally said: let kids draw the math until they truly own it. That’s hard to argue with, even when the homework takes longer and the kitchen table has more eraser shavings than it ever did when I was a kid. We’re still figuring it out together.
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