RE: “I’m fighting it like a cornered animal.”
Good luck. Can you tell us how you do that?
One detail I’m curious about. RE: Group work and let them teach each other –- are these methods identified as something that Common Core now requires?
Or were these trends in place for more than five years?
You know what? That’s a good question... LAUSD has always been obsessed with “group work.” All they want in the world is for you to put the kids in groups, give them an assignment... and then take the blame when they don’t learn a blessed thing. It’s frustrating.
They have been doing group work at least since my oldest children were in elementary school. That was in the late 90s and early 2000s. It doesn’t seem to have destroyed their ability to think and learn. Amazingly, they can read after being taught sight words AND phonics. All of my children read well.
I have a lot of issues with the current methods for teaching. But I have noticed that children continue learning in spite of the curriculum. They are human. They have natural tendencies to seek knowledge.
My second oldest son is in college now, and he does group work in his computer classes. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not. He is happy that he is in the smartest group in one of the classes. They just happened to be sitting near one another the day the groups were made. My son has learned from others and vice versa. My husband is a programmer, and they do a lot of group work as well as individual work. He has learned a lot of valuable information from working with others in groups.
My son in computer classes has been subjected to group work all his life. He was invariably the smartest person in his groups. (Except when he was taking Spanish. He was grouped with native Spanish speakers. He let them do all the work.) Son worked better in groups because he had pressure to actually do the work or his friends would make bad grades. If he had assignments that he had to do alone, he wouldn’t do them. He would take a bad grade. He would even do other student’s homework for them and not turn in the very same assignment for himself. He was an infuriating child.