Common Core must not be very popular if even left-leaning shows like NBC's Great News are taking swipes at it. In the January 11 episode "Competing Offer," when bad guy Fenton Pelt (guest star Jim Rash) can't quite get his story to add up, he blames Common Core math.
The incredibly wealthy, and equally eccentric, Pelt is suing "The Breakdown," the news show around which Good News centers. The show's host Chuck (John Michael Higgins) thinks that he can get him to withdraw the lawsuit, seeing as they are both Nebraskans, and goes to speak with him. What Chuck has forgotten is that he interviewed Pelt in the 1970s, and Pelt has been holding a grudge ever since.
Pelt was being interviewed for winning a science fair for kids back then, but Chuck had discovered that he wasn't 15 as he claimed. He was a 29-year-old man who pretended to be older in order to win prizes in competitions for kids. When Chuck exposed Pelt's true age on television inn the '70s, Pelt was humiliated. He says it is because he was actually 15, which Chuck knows to be a lie. Pelt tries to lay it all out for Chuck, but can't quite get his story straight.
Pelt: It wasn't the truth, I was 15 in 1977, and I'll be 30 next week!
Chuck: I don't think that math checks out.
Pelt: I don't get math. I went to school in the 2000s and we were taught Common Core!
Obviously, Pelt wasn't in school in the 2000s, but Common Core is a great scapegoat for being terrible at math, and he knows it. Since the standards were introduced, teachers have complained that they set up kids to fail, parents have complained that the counter-intuitive way they teach math actually makes it harder and their kids are getting right answers marked wrong, and the kids? Well, they're stuck with nonsensical math problems that might lead to them not being able to figure out their age, just like Pelt.
It's nice to see that even Hollywood is willing to recognize how hard Common Core is failing.
