And there was a time Steve Jobs was considered a failure who was considered more show than substance. Times change. And time has a way for letting the important persist while forgetting the non-essential.

Gates Foundation is involved in many non-tech areas, e.g. education & health.

https://www.google.com/search?q=gates+foundation+investment+...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled...

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"The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.

Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration."

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I have never been a hater and respect the man, but knowing that he had a role in promoting Common Core actually lowers my opinion of him considerably.

Have you seen what ridiculous methods they're requiring children to learn in math? No longer can teachers be reasonable by allowing you to solve a problem your own way, as long as you show your work and get the right answer. All this has done is remove parents from the teaching process. I only know about math from my younger cousins and friends who are teachers, but I'm sure some of the other subjects have their own issues.

> No longer can teachers be reasonable by allowing you to solve a problem your own way, as long as you show your work and get the right answer.

Suppose after a week of lectures on sorting, you ask your students to implement a sorting algorithm. From one student, you get back a 400 line monstrosity that somehow, miraculously, does the right thing. Do you shrug it off and say "as long as it works", or do you grow very concerned that the student is somehow missing the forest for the trees, even though they arrived at an apparently correct answer?

In my experience teaching, it's far more likely that the student doesn't understand some basic, necessary underlying concepts than that the student is very bright and was trying to come up with a super optimized sorting algorithm. Both will exist, and you have to differentiate. The worst bit is that often the idiots know this, and imagine themselves to be super intelligent, so they're impossible to teach.

IMHO "just get the right answer" has never been a reasonable way to teach math.

> All this has done is remove parents from the teaching process.

I hear this a lot. We're basically just talking about different ways of doing arithmetic or multiplication.

It's akin to bitching and moaning because someone taught your kid insertion sort, and you only know bubble sort so now you can't teach your kid sorting.

Is the problem that the curriculum developers are being obtuse, or is the problem that many parents and teachers never really had a deep enough understanding addition/multiplication/division in the first place?

It's pretty scary how few of our elementary/middle school teachers -- who teach math -- cannot differentiate from the definition of addition (a set of axioms), and algorithms which implement addition. Because they don't know the difference between a specification and an implementation, teaching multiple implementations seems silly. But it's not silly at all, and the difference between the definition of a thing and an algorithm matching the definition is something our elementary, middle and high school students can, should, and hopefully will understand -- unmotivated and stubborn teachers/parents be damned.

Doesn't sound good. What age groups are affected by Common Core? I wonder if this helps or hurts the homeschooling crowd.

> Doesn't sound good.

It's overblown hype. Kids should understand multiple algorithms for addition/subtraction/multiplication/division for the same reason that we teach CS undergrads multiple sorting algorithms.

The point isn't to be able to pound out a sorting algorithm on the spot, but that learning about sorting algorithms provides a good "prototype" of thinking about algorithms more generally. Ditto for mathematical operators.

The problem is that parents never really had a deep understanding of even basic arithmetic. It's a self-reproducing cycle, and the USA will continue to lag behind the rest of the developed world in mathematics if our primary standard is "how the past generation did things".

>What age groups are affected by Common Core?

K-12

> I wonder if this helps or hurts the homeschooling crowd.

Ostensibly helps, because more teaching aids/material will be available, and knowing several algorithms to achieve the same thing helps you understand the concept in a much deeper way.

Actually it doesn't matter, because home schoolers aren't obligated to follow CC standards, and are likely to treat anything CC-related as pure unadulterated evil without actually evaluating pedagogical evidence.

You are discounting a LOT of Bill Gate's history. Yes, he did miss the "internet", (as someone who worked with Microsoft in Australia) he literally turned the company around in 6 weeks.

But if you still say Bill "missed" the internet, you are discounting Netscape vs IE wars.

The internet in the 90's was a very different place to the internet today.

But before that, Bill Gates got a lot right! Eg Excel vs Lotus, Word vs Word Perfect, Windows vs OS. The whole history of DOS.

As others have said, its like saying Steve Jobs is a failure because he was sacked by the company he founded (Apple).

Don't forget X-box. They didn't miss the Internet, but they did misfire on music. They had an awfully good track record for a long time.

To be fair, everyone (except Apple) misfired on music...