Posted on 03/31/2014 8:27:20 AM PDT by A_perfect_lady
I have been a Freeper for 12 years and a teacher for 10. I work in Los Angeles, in a public school, and I teach English. I want to say something about Common Core, although my observations will be strictly limited to my particular domain: English. I cannot comment on the Math portion.
I will begin bluntly: I do not understand the conservative outcry about Common Core. Perhaps it’s only because I teach in California, but to me it is an improvement, at least in some ways. If you aren’t a teacher (and most conservatives aren’t, which is a pity) you don’t realize what California standards were like. Oh, the goals themselves weren’t particularly remarkable… in the end, the goals are always the same for English, no matter how they word them: children should be able to summarize, identify, describe, explain, compare, analyze, evaluate, and synthesize the plot, characters, setting, theme, mood, tone… same stuff they’ve done for years.
What was noxious about California standards was their pressure to conform to a liberal reading list. The text books they issued looked as if someone had gone down a checklist with authors arranged by skin color and nationality. I could almost hear the editor muttering to himself, “We need an Indonesian.” Very few authors were classic writers noted for their skill. They seemed to think one short story by Hemingway, one by Poe, and one by Bradbury was sufficient to represent the Dead White Males of the Pre-enlightenment Era (that’s sarcasm, for those of you in Rio Linda). The ESL textbooks were even more pointed: children were directed to read essays on how FDR saved America, how nuclear power is bad, bad, bad, how the 2nd amendment is contingent upon government permission(!), how migrant workers are victimized by pesticides… yes, it was cheery stuff.
Now comes Common Core, and one of the first things they addressed in the training was this: children raised on the simplistic language of modern-day PC authors cannot comprehend anything else, and did horribly on the periodic assessments. The periodic assessments, created by people who apparently hadn’t gotten the memo, had included excerpts from The Odyssey, Anne of Green Gables, Call of the Wild, David Copperfield… could a child raised on the toothless prose of Gary Soto and bell hooks even comprehend the long, intricate sentences that were common to writers many years ago? No, they couldn’t. Imagine that.
So this is what the Common Core material suggests: classic writers. Documents written by the Founding Fathers. Greek mythology. Mark Twain. Louisa May Alcott. Yes, really. Common Core steps away from guiding the teacher’s curriculum along the PC lines of “authors of color” and “writers who champion social justice” and actually recommends classics, but makes no effort to control what the teacher chooses. This, my Friends, can only be an improvement, because liberals were in charge of our books for too many years. Any choices by teachers will swing to the right because frankly, they were so far to the left that there was no way to go further unless you have 7th graders reading Andrea Dworkin, and teachers with that attitude would have already been doing it.
I don’t expect a wave of support… my sad experience is that many Freepers hate teachers with such a livid passion that I wonder about them. But I wanted to say this: Common Core is much less prohibitive in English than the previous standards. Again, I cannot speak to the mathematics, the science, the history… but I can tell you that in English, it’s an improvement, for the reasons I have given above. Okay, flame away.
You mean like the “scientific answers” to global warming?
If only the school districts would have their students read materials from ‘classic authors.’ I had to walk away from the school district I worked at for almost 10 years because of their bureaucracy and pitiful attempts to stand up for what is right instead of bowing down to the stupid pressure of political correctness. Yes, the district spent MILLIONS just in sensitivity training for every employee of the district because we had such a horrible, horrible book on the required reading list and it contained the N word. The book was Huckleberry Finn. No matter how loud some of us protested that Mark Twain produced some of the best novels in the 20th century and that it only depicted the times in which it was written, the pressure from Groups Representing the Foreigners immigrating to this country prevailed. Although our school board managed to mediate between the offended and the school and come to an adequate and fair solution, because this happened in Texas (and I guess it goes without saying that we are all racists), these “Groups” filed suit at the federal level and caused them to come in and help us decide what the best solution was — BAN that book from our libraries and DEMAND ALL EMPLOYEES go through sensitivity training. That is where disgust for Common Core lies, not so much at a classroom level. All decision-making at the local level is terribly diminished. California should have been at the forefront in teaching the nation how to educate children within their own surroundings. Sadly, it was the first to fall prey to the likes of LaRaza and LULAC. Shameful.
Thanks for letting us know. Being a public school teacher in California must be quite an experience.
This is unfortunate. The public school teachers here in liberal Connecticut have been on our side, for the most part. They even worked with me to get around the previous teaching fad, "Chicago math". They encouraged my kid to bring in a replica rifle for a presentation on Davy Crockett. Civics in emphacized. They've been willing to allow fair presentations that promote the use of DDT and I've given a pro-nuclear power presentation.
Common Core math is terrible. It really is. But its a diffferent kind of terrible from the previous system. I view it as something that sucks just as bad as the old fad.
I’m a senior in a CA high school. The public school system is awful. For example, I had to ask my history/government teacher why exactly she keeps referring to the US as a democracy. She made something up about it being “easier” to do so. I have to constantly listen to communistic “solutions” for fixing the country, along with constant whining about “rich” people not giving poor people money. While I have never excelled in math,I did fairly decently until I moved to CA. The explanations are nigh impossible for me to grasp. I can say that I’ve never had a problem with my English courses, but perhaps I don’t know what I’m missing.
Some of the worst written questions
I assign my students research papers (two).
Seriously, out of, say, 30 students in a class, about five will write something readable.
It is rare to find a freshman or sophomore that is able to read well, let alone express themselves coherently with thought and reason, backed by credible sources.
Sad to say the top performing students are the Asian students. This semester I have two, one from Singapore and the other from China. They both study, read, contribute and grasp the concepts of freedom, individual liberty and responsibility, and can explain why America has a constitution and why we have checks and balances. The US students barely keep their eyes open, if they come to class at all. Nonetheless, many are shocked and offended when they receive a grade less than a “B.”
While US students are mostly lazy, some wake up once they earn that “D” or “F” on their first paper. Some. Not many.
Thanks for the education. I had really not heard anything about the English side of Common Core. All the examples I’ve seen up to this point were in Math. And thanks for your service as a teacher. As you pointed out, we need more conservative teachers.
Thank you for teaching our children. I will have a question for you later....
Whatever Common Core may have to do with English is very nearly irrelevant because the teaching of mathematics in this program is so awful. Common Core stresses conceptual mathematics. This is an enormous mistake, and it is a mistake that we have been making since 1962, when "The New Math" was first introduced. Conceptual Mathematics is a darling of educationists, and is thoroughly despised by practitioners: engineers, physicists, chemists, economists, ... and even most mathematicians who follow education.
You simply cannot teach young children mathematical concepts until they have the the basics down absolutely cold. Attempting to do so is like attempting to teach reading without knowing the alphabet and the phonics made by letter combinations. They must know this at a reflexive, sub-cortical level without even thinking about it, or they cannot possibly concentrate on the actual meaning of text.
Conceptual Mathematics for children under twelve or thirteen is worse than a waste of time -- it is destructive.It teaches them nothing they need and in many cases fosters a genuine lifelong hatred of mathematics. Almost no two humans conceptualize mathematics in the same way, and forcing some professional educator's concepts down an aspiring mathematician's throat is an excellent way to destroy her desire to learn math.
Every time we have tried the educationists' approach, we have ruined another generation of children for math, and every time we've tried it, it's ultimately been abandoned with at least a temporary return to the basics of arithmetic drill and operation.
I agree with you that what most of my children were forced to read was liberal crap. This isn't particularly damaging to them, because most kids recognize -- and have recognized for as long as there has been a public education system -- that the "literature" they're being told to read is about half garbage, and nothing more than garbage that their English teachers themselves like. Thus has it ever been [examples from my youth: The Crucible, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby quite frankly, all worthless dreck.] But at that point in their academic careers, they already -- at least -- know how to read. The Common Core standards for math are disabling our students at a much younger and much more dangerous age.
Yes, exactly. It’s actually LESS controlling. Less than California, anyway. There’s more “recommending” and less “mandated.”
First of all, you’ve been a teacher for how long and do not understand the concept of local control of education being the best approach?
Do you not understand that Education DOES NOT fall under the limited number of items the Federal Government has responsibility for controlling per the Constitution?
The common core standards in English may seem innocuous in the beginning, but you may be discounting the creeping incrementalizm of the educational left. Look to the common core mission statement and long term goals and you will undoubtedly unearth the true agenda.
“. . .and that parents should have little say in their children’s education”
Not true.
They want to hear from parents. . . . . . . . as long as the parents support them and go along with ‘The Plan.’
As far as I’m concerned, teachers should be independent contractors. Good ones can write their own ticket and the bad ones can work at McDonald’s.
Not only should that be the ideal, it should be the law!
The driving force behind "public" education was to ensure the ability to properly participate in a representative government, specifically, ours.
Books used to be the primary means of information dissemination and they were rare and expensive so common repositories, schools and libraries, were logical.
The internet has changed that. Not even the invention of movable type has as large an impact on the availability of information. Without noting that a government-union controlled school has no chance of actually serving the consumers, schools have long since failed to serve their intended purpose.
It is long past time to terminate the government schools and sell the physical assets to the private sector.
PS. I teach math and science both publicly and privately as my retirement job.
If you think the reading list doesn’t matter, you are profoundly blind to the facts. And the military is run by top-down control, now isn’t it? If all you can see is “Federal Government BAD” ... I guess I’d have to see if you’re consistent in that by asking your take on abortion and gay marriage. If you are indeed consistent, I’ll take you for a Libertarian, and there’s nothing more to say. If you aren’t, I’ll take you for a hypocrite and there’s nothing more to say.
Bump
I see your point there. It's terribly expensive and it's going to roll out about as smoothly as Obamacare. I suspect their real goal is faster feedback (standardized tests often take months to get the scores back). It's more likely a stupid waste of money, though, than an Ev-il Government Plot.
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