Are Kids Actually Taught New Math or Common Core? What Parents Need to Know
Last Tuesday, I was folding sweatshirts after dinner when my 9-year-old Lila pushed her math worksheet across the kitchen table and sighed. “I don’t get why I can’t just do it the way you showed me,” she said, nodding at the problem: 34 minus 16. I set down a pair of striped socks and leaned in. There it was, the grid of tens and ones, the arrows breaking one 10 into 10 individual ones, the extra three lines of writing I’d never done when I was a kid. As a 4th grade teacher, I get asked this question more than any other at back-to-school night: Is this what they call new math? Or is it Common Core? What’s the difference anyway?
I remember being confused too, 11 years ago when I first started teaching. Back then, I’d bring home worksheets just like this, stare at them and think this is just extra work for no reason. My mentor teacher, Ms. Rita, who’d been teaching for 30 years, sat me down with a coffee in the teacher’s lounge and pointed at that same 34 minus 16 problem. She asked me to explain why we borrow one from the tens place. I froze. I could do the step, but I couldn’t put into words what that actually meant. That’s when I got it: this isn’t some new trick to mess with parents. This is just asking kids to actually understand what they’re doing, instead of just memorizing steps.
So what’s the actual answer? Common Core isn’t a curriculum, it’s a set of standards that say what kids should know at each grade level. The big shift with Common Core was moving from memorizing steps to understanding the ideas behind math, like place value, how numbers fit together, and how to solve problems that don’t look exactly like the example you did in class. What most people call “new math” is just how teachers are teaching to hit those standards. It’s not a brand new invention—people have been arguing about “new math” since the 1950s, when the first big push to teach understanding over memorization happened. It just looks different than what you learned growing up, if you grew up memorizing steps and taking timed tests.
I had a dad at my last back-to-school night tell me he’d helped his son with homework the night before, and got so mad he threw the worksheet in the trash. He said it was stupid to make a kid draw a picture for a problem they could solve in their head. I get that anger. I’ve seen bad implementations: worksheets that force kids to do three extra steps even if they already get the concept, teachers that ban the old algorithm kids learn from their parents, confusing wording that makes a simple problem seem impossible. That’s not what the standards ask for. But when it’s done well, it’s not stupid. Last year, I had a 5th grader who could explain why you can’t add the numerators of two fractions with different denominators by drawing a pizza cut into different slices. His mom told me she’d never understood that rule herself, she just memorized it and got half those problems wrong every test. That’s the whole point.
So what do you do when you’re sitting at the kitchen table staring at a worksheet that looks like it’s written in another language? The first thing I tell parents to do is ask your kid to show you what their teacher taught them. Instead of jumping in and saying “this is dumb, just do it my way,” just say, “Can you walk me through what this means?” That’s not just for your benefit. Asking a kid to explain their thinking helps them solidify what they learned, and it shows you what the point of the exercise actually is.
If after walking through it together, your kid still doesn’t get it, you can absolutely show them the method you learned. Most teachers don’t ban old methods. They just want kids to understand why the method works before they memorize it. If your kid already gets that 4 ones can’t take away 6 ones, they don’t have to draw the grid every single time. If your kid is stressed out over extra steps, you can shoot their teacher a quick email that says, “My kid understands how this works, can they use the shortcut?” Nine times out of ten, the teacher will say yes.
If you’re still confused, most teachers are used to this question. A quick 1-sentence email is all it takes to get an explanation that will make homework time a lot less stressful.
Last week, Lila brought home a 12 times 15 multiplication problem, and she did it with the box method, drawing four little boxes and splitting the numbers into tens and ones. I asked her why it worked, and she said, “It’s just breaking the big problem into four little easy problems.” She did the old stacked multiplication method after that, got the same answer, and closed her notebook. It still looks like extra work to me. I still default to the method I learned when I was 9, because that’s what I memorized. But Lila can explain what she’s doing, and she doesn’t panic when she gets a problem she hasn’t seen before. That’s more than I could do when I was her age. We still have tough homework nights sometimes, when the worksheet is confusing and we’re both tired and we end up texting the teacher to ask what’s going on. It’s not perfect. But it’s not some big conspiracy to confuse kids and parents, either. It’s just trying to get kids to think about math, instead of just repeating steps.
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