A: You're telling me it will take parents no longer to teach their kids what they already know than it would to learn some Newspeak mathematics and teach ten different ways of doing simple problems instead? I don't buy it. The fact that guides exist for teaching parents the new math proves there's an issue. I don't…

A: It's insulting and disingenuous to accuse parents of "not having time for their children" because they don't want to, need to, or have the time to learn overly-complicated ways of doing simple mathematics. What a horrific mindset, to try to browbeat and shame people into staying quiet when they're dissatisfied with…

Common Core is causing an adoption of these new curricula. Of course people target it.

A: How and what are two very different things.

It shouldn't take an adult an hour to learn any means of performing basic addition and subtraction. Forcing a new and (somehow) improved system that is overly complicated to the point of disengaging parents from their children's education is ridiculous, and so is blaming parents for daring to question it.

I would point out that there are school districts in the States that have adopted or partially adopted (more frequent breaks and a summer of only 4 to 6 weeks) this sort of method not to mention some countries that don't have a summer break as we know it, and it hadn't led to a breakdown of society there.

I didn't say we should do away with that. As I said, a lot of proposals have the same amount of time away from school, simply in the form of shorter but more frequent breaks. In that time you can still have just as many days of unstructured recreational time.

I won't argue why summer vacation exists if we agree that it's still an outdated practice whose original reasons for being are now irrelevant. My larger point is that you can do away with summer vacation without actually changing the total number of classroom days by simply adopting a different type of schedule.

Common Core is causing an adoption of these new curricula. Of course people target it. That's such a ridiculous non-answer.

If a 'new system' of mathematics takes "an hour" (your word) to teach a fully grown, educated, and mentally fit adult how to do basic mathematical operations, is it any wonder parents think this 'new system' is flawed?

I, as a hypothetical and thankfully not actual parent, don't see why I should go back to second-grade elementary textbooks to teach me how to subtract 12 from 32. I already know how to do that without employing a freaking flowchart, twelve-step PowerPoint presentation, and sacrificing a lamb in the midst of a…

A lot of people advocate not changing the amount of school time, but changing the scheduling. As a rough explanation (and I know the math doesn't actually add up to the same number of days, I said rough didn't I?) consider a schedule of "two to three weeks of school, one week off" or four-day school weeks. It…

While time away from school is important (as kids need to learn more than the three R's) huge chunks of time away from school has been known for a long time to be detrimental to learning and recall. Are you so old that you've forgotten that the first month or two of any given school year is just bringing students back…

Then they'll struggle with 90% of the quizzes. Still seeing an issue here.

How dare parents try to be invested in their children's education and grow frustrated at overly-complicated and foreign methods of doing simple operations that alienate them from their children's education. Those bastards.

If they pick and choose the one method out of ten that clicks for them and use it going forward, they'll miss 90% of the exam that tests their knowledge of all ten methods.

Oh, good, so I'm not the only one who stares at elementary-school math problems and has no idea what the hell she's looking at?

But it isn't my luck. At least according to data centers (which use large and therefore statistically useful samples of hard drives) Seagates are more likely to fail than some competing brands like Hitachi and WD. As I said, Lifehacker itself has reported on this.

I see what you're trying to say, but not every scene can be the climax of the book. You need to have quiet scenes so that the biggest and most important scenes stand out more. Sometimes you need to have dialogue or slower scenes to establish who characters are or why you should care about them as a reader. Before Star…

I dunno, I find the Internet has a lot of utility for me as a writer, but self-control is important. If you idly check Twitter or something, you will waste hours. But I can't write without occasionally Googling a fact or using an ethnic name generator for some bit role I didn't plan a name for.