Core math can be a mystery

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Jennifer Craig stared at her daughter’s fifth-grade math homework. It was a three-digit multiplication problem, and it seemed simple enough. But her 10-year-old was supposed to solve it by drawing a chart, breaking apart numbers, multiplying, adding and maybe more.

“I’m lost,” said Craig, a 31-year-old stay at home mother of three.

And that’s how she found herself in her daughter’s classroom Monday night, sitting alongside other parents in child-size chairs and listening as teacher Alyshia Thomas explained new math strategies.

Most U.S. public school students are learning math very differently than their parents did, due to Common Core State Standards, national K-12 math and reading benchmarks that have been adopted by 43 states and the District of Columbia.

The changes have confused many parents — particularly at the elementary level — leaving them flustered by a basic parental duty: Helping with homework.

Nicole Barksdale, 5, left, walks by as Maryn Butki, 11, right, a student at Scripps Middle School in Lake Orion, Mich., helps Paige Berry, 10, and Sydney Sabol, 10, both of Pine Tree Elementary, figure out the cost of ingredients for pumpkin pancakes at math night at a grocery store. (Joshua Lott/For The Washington Post)

“Almost every parent comes in and says, ‘This is not how I learned math,’ ” said Melissa Palermo, an energetic fourth-grade teacher who coaches other teachers in math at the Nathaniel Hawthorne school here.

Palermo is a believer in the Common Core, a wholesale andcontroversial change in American public education, because she says her students are reaping the benefits of the new standards. They are showing a more sophisticated understanding of math and are able to perform operations they otherwise wouldn’t have learned until they were older, she said.

But parents are another matter.

“The toughest part is the homework part because parents, it’s so hard for them,” Palermo said. “A lot of parents, they doubt themselves because there are all these models and things they’ve never seen before.”