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Betty Peters hates Common Core, PowerPoint, and “counting up”

Caperton

Alabama School Board member Betty Peters really, really hates Common Core. Like, a lot. A lot. No, seriously, you really can’t appreciate how much she hates Common Core. And it’s because the homosexualists are trying to make our sons wear outfits, and do math in stupid ways that didn’t get us to the moon, and the SPLC and their PowerPoint presentations full of charts, and we have to stand up for our children.

“I understand Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi are the three Southern states targeted by the radical, left, homosexualists to change our students’ perspective,” Peters said. “We have gone past gay, lesbian and bi-sexual and we’re now into gender fluid spectrum.”

[…]

“The Southern Poverty Law Center is going to be developing your children or grandchild or neighbors’ children into little social activists for social justice, as they define it, or else transgender stuff,” Peters said, as she distributed a coloring book sheet with pictures of a variety of clothing items.

“This is part of teaching tolerance for transgenderism to four to eight year olds,” Peters said. “The students are given color crayons and two handouts. They students are supposed to color the photos of the clothes they want to wear.

“You will notice these are called outfits,” Peters said. “I have never asked my son or my husband what ‘outfit’ they are going to wear. This is just crazy. I think all this stuff is mainly written by whacky feminists.[“]

[…]

“As I said when I first campaigned and I’ve said it every time since, we need to get back to the basics: Reading, writing and arithmetic from first grade on,” Peters said. “We need to be teaching the ‘c’ part which is Christian values, not Muslim values, not transgender values. We need to be teaching the old Biblical values.[“]

[…]

“Our nation has gone to Gomorrah and it’s up to us to turn it around,” she said referring to one of two ancient cities near the Dead Sea that were cited in the Bible as being destroyed by God as a punishment for the wickedness of their inhabitants. “There are enough voters out there who think like we do and we have just got to take our children back.

“Stand up. Don’t be afraid of upsetting the school. The schools cannot exist without students. It’s your responsibility to shield your child and preserve his or her innocence as long as you can,” Peters said. “They’re growing up way too fast and it’s not good.”

Yeah, that’s why Alabama public education ranks 45th in the country, and U.S. students are solidly lukewarm on an international scale: outfits and “counting up.” Won’t someone think of the children?

5 thoughts on Betty Peters hates Common Core, PowerPoint, and “counting up”

  1. Teach old Biblical values? If only they would, we’d have lots fewer Xtians pushing their values down our throats.

  2. I wasn’t familiar with “counting up” until now, but it’s a perfectly sensible method when you read about it. I think she’d be shocked if she actually asked her own parents or grandparents how they do math. There’s a good chance it’s not how she does it.

    I learned to subtract one column at a time, right-to-left, “borrowing” 1 from the top/first number/”minuend” the next column over if needed. I remember my grandfather was frustrated by my use of that method, because he had always subtracted column by column left to right — if he needed to borrow, he would revise the previous answer by subtracting one from it, not revise the minuend. Likewise, he added left-to-right, and would carry the 1 into a second round of addition between his previous result, and a new number that was all 0s and 1s from the carries. Which might generate new carries until it was done.

    There are also students in the past who used the method of complements to alter the first number and turn it into an addition problem, kind of like how “counting up” turns it into an addition problem, but it’s a bit less obvious why it works. This is basically how computers do it because for various reasons it’s super-efficient, but it was widely taught in the US in the period immediately before WWI. In part because they had mechanical adding machines, as in early mechanical calculators, and mechanical complementing machines so you could subtract with an adding machine, but they had trouble with useful mechanical subtracting machines.

    I know almost nothing about Common Core, and I am not a product of the US education system in the first place so I also have no idea what it’s being compared to, but this is not a strong voice.

    1. So I actually grabbed some paper and tried adding and subtracting and multiplying from right to left and then left to right like Ens described, and the left to right method takes a million rows and a lot more writing.

  4. I pretty much always do subtractions in my head by counting up. I didn’t know there was a term for it.
    The left-to-right method is easier for mental math as well – after you’ve gotten used to it it’s really not separate steps. For instance:
    822 – 588
    You know the first digit is 2 because the digit you are subtracting in the next column is greater than the one you are subtracting it from, and the same goes for the tens; you can read the answer off directly left to right, 234. With a little practice you can do it pretty much as fast as reading the equation. Then you can be depressed by how easy it is to impress people with simple mental math.

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