that the US traditional approach to math is really bad. There is a reason that so many kids hate math by the time they get to high school and it is not because math is inherently awful, it is because the rote memorization approach does not lead to conceptual understanding.

So it is ironic to me that all the parents who grew up in a traditional math environment that turned them off to math completely aren't giving this at least a chance to succeed. They all take one look at it and throw up their hands because it isn't immediately obvious to them what the methods are trying to do for kids.

Every time I see a Common Core problem that is trying to help a kid understand conceptually what is happening (especially when the question maybe isn't the best written or clearest) and then some parent writes something like "look how easy I got to the answer by doing traditional long division. How stupid is this! Ha Ha!" and then posts it to Facebook, it makes me wonder if we aren't giving something new a short shrift just because it is different and we aren't used to the approach.