Parents' biggest frustration with distance learning

By AJ Willingham for CNN

(CNN)It’s a truly humbling moment when your child asks you to help diagram a sentence or solve a grade-level math problem and you, a functioning adult with a diploma and years of experience, draw a complete blank.

Anyone with school-aged children can probably relate. And as many schools start the year with virtual learning, parents are trying to summon even more of that long-forgotten knowledge.

Helping your child navigate Zoom tech support can be daunting. So can balancing work and household duties with making sure your children are engaged and learning.

But the single biggest challenge, many parents say, are the math topics taught through Common Core — a standardized teaching method rolled out in 2010.

Making it through math class

Lisa Cantrell, a marketing director in Douglasville, Georgia, says math is the biggest challenge for her nine-year-old and 12-year-old — and for her.

“I’ve just set the expectation with them that I will teach them the way I know and they’re going to have to translate it to the way they’ve been taught in school,” she says. “They still get angry when I don’t understand what they’re trying to explain to me.”

For the blessedly uninitiated, Common Core math methods require children to group numbers to solve arithmetic problems, rather than the vertical “carry the one” method most adults are used to. The approach goes beyond simple computation to emphasize deeper mathematical concepts.

“Our son in second grade was learning math using the ‘grouping method,’ and my husband had to learn it. He said it was counterintuitive,” says Monique Owens of Mableton, Georgia. “I refused to do the math portion of anything.”

Some parents, like Brian Federico, a director of product management from Atlanta, have taken this problem into their own hands. Read more from CNN.

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