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.
“the bill and melinda gates abortion clinic”
Great idea
Great ones get their own Lyceum or whatever it was
This is because it usually requires an education degree/certificate instead of something useful.
I can’t comment about the English aspects of CC because I haven’t looked at “sample problems” or “exercises” proffered by either adherents or opponents to CC. Nor was I all that strong in English in high school but I was a vicious monster in math with 790, 796, and 800 on my SATs. Nor am I a teacher.
The two subjects are just profoundly different. English has a degree of fluff in it, and other than the ability to recall specific facts and names in reading comprehension, I have an appreciation for a student’s ability to interpret, to equivocate and to gain impressions from reading. S’cool. I myself have only a little of that.
But math, especially up to pre-calculus, it is my opinion that you want to take this stuff and crush it. You want to have a grasp of the procedures and approaches and have deep certainty as to what you are doing and beat its head in. This takes confidence and a degree of aggression, IMHO. You get to that condition by practicing the stuff and developing an appreciation of the idea that even though it may be boring, it can be approached with a certain rhythm and yes, rote, but the student is acquiring something and seeing definite progress. There is symmetry, there is pattern recognition....very musical in some senses. That’s a confidence builder. It’s probably a different area of the brain.
The difference, in a nutshell, is the value one ascribes to CERTAINTY. Some people like certainty, myself among them. Kids, IMO, have very, very little they can be certain about, except by default, eg; they don’t even think about it. For some, I very much believe certainty and confidence are character-building elements and there are those who have a natural affinity for certainty and those for whom the trait could be developed. Others shun certainty.
My objection to the CC math I have seen is the idea that, completely eliminated from the realm of possibility is, you know something and you know it so cold you can grab it by the throat and kill it.
Sorry for the aggressive tone!
LA Roosevelt High has an on-campus abortion clinic from what I am reading, such a “proud” moment in government education , NOT
Excellent!
Oh, I agree whole-heartedly. The entire education field has tried to get children to build castles of insight in the air without any foundation on the ground, leap-frogging over memorizing, summarizing, and sheer volume of reading to try and find a shortcut wherein a child can read one little story about a Mexican boy in a barrio and glean all sorts of remarkable insights with it, manipulate the text to milk out symbols and messages and connections and meaning... Because children just inherently possess the ability to make profound insights about life based on a simple short story they can barely read, see? It's very frustrating. But that's not specific to Common Core, that's been the field of education for decades now.
What math classes are you having troubles in?
I teach and would be glad to help a fellow FReeper.
Well, conservatives are to blame. They don’t go into the field of education; it doesn’t pay enough. So you left it all to the liberals, and they did what they wanted with it. Well done, you.
Ping!
Better not hand out too many poor grades - not good for the college (or more properly, the accreditation mill).
“And the military is run by top-down control, now isn’t it? “
Apples and oranges, and clearly you have no idea about the military and their approach to education and training, let alone strategy and doctrine development and operational practices.
Ever hear of “Centralized control - decentralized execution?”
I bet not.
Centralized control means leadership sets the objective and the unit (’local’) commanders control how that is done.
Ever hear of LBJ and his approach to military operations?
I bet not.
“Centralized control - centralized execution” (CC) was his approach. . .and abject failure was the result.
CC is nothing more than LBJ, in a way.
I’ve completed all my math requirements actually. :) I had to work really hard to make sense of Algebra I and II and geometry, but I made it.
It's a trip sometimes. My school is inner-city, surrounded by gang territory, and the population is 96% Latino (at least.) Yet most of the kids are really sweet, and we hope to help them get out of there one day, if out is what they want.
Ooo... interesting. What novels do they have you reading??
I am actually happy to hear about the English side. The math side isn’t an improvement, unfortunately.
Some of the stuff I’ve seen is baffling, and so convoluted, that it appears the authors were going out of their way to be obtuse.
What I fear is the federalization of education, and it appears Common Core is a first step. Education was the province of states, with Uncle Sugar stepping in to provide funding for lunches and other enhanced curricular items.
The 10th Amendment is such a blurry line now that initiatives like this are met with wariness, to be generous, and outright hostility to be more realistic.
All of this to point out the obvious - the FedGov lies so often and about so many things that almost any initiative they undertake - for good or for ill - is going to be lost in the distrust.
I came from CA, grew up there, and I wouldn’t raise a kid there any more. Same with NY, MA, and other blue states. Fact is it is hard to find a piece of coastline that’s still conservative. It feels like a gangrenous rot to the middle of the country, like you could lop off the east and west coast and you may be able to save the patient.
I applaud that you are an educator, and I encourage you to continue in that all-important pursuit. I appreciate your assessment of the English CC stuff. Anything else you can contribute would be great.
Yes, same here. Every time.
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