Your comments are thoughtful. Thank you.
I don’t think you have been in education long enough to have gone through their *national standards* revisions.
Millions were spent on workshops, training, re-writing curriculums and assessments.
Our state of Ct had a whole web site devoted to collecting and making available lesson plans submitted by teachers to peer review.
Poof! All that disappeared....down the drain. Now there is CC....same old with a *new* name.
One thing you will learn, is that if you stay in the game long enough....you’ll be around for all the pendulum swings. Of that you can be certain.
My GD [grade 5] started taking the CC last week...I’m paying particular attention. Her district calls it the *Better Balance* test ....we nicknamed it the *Margarine* test.
It going to take a while for the teachers to revamp their lessons to begin *teaching to this test*. Only recently have professional evaluations been linked to student test scores. That, in itself, opens a whole host of problems for cheating. In my 33 years, I saw it and that won’t go away anytime soon.
Best of luck!
Ping for later reading by Mrs Zippo, the English teacher.
From another FR thread:
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/03/125409-crazily-scary-common-core-problem-asks/
I watched my daughter’s class take a common core spelling test the other day. It was all multiple guess. This was a third grade class. It is funny because my daughter’s homework from the night before was for me to give her a spelling test. An old fashioned spelling test. But the Common Core supplied test did not require students to write the words at all.
I went to southern Calif schools in the 60’s (elementary around the Ojai area). We didn’t need any CC or NCLB, etc.
The History Standards mess of the Nineties really scarred a lot of people to the point where trust in centralized standards passed down from on high is a red flag.
I'd like to think that this time it's different, but it's hard to hear "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" without getting very anxious.
I appreciate this from you. I agree that original founding documents and real literature are essential for a good education. This definitely helps me toward accepting common core for my one child in SoCal public school.
Thanks.
At least it’s an improvement in California.
I'd be curious to read from any other Freepers who are math/science teachers their take on Common Core.
I hire engineers, often entry level. Out of the hundreds of resumes I read (and these are from college grads with good grades), too many have misspelled words and/or incomplete sentences, and these are things they should learn before college! Somehow, our education system is failing them!!!