That's not hard at all for me because my youngest of 5 daughters is finishing high school this year and she is the full embodiment of where Common core is succeeding and where it is not.
Before I hastily mount this really high horse and take a terrible fall, I must repeat my skeptical black man (occasionally angry) statement underlined in the last paragraph.
Common Core is not and must not succeed in the effort to keep standardized testing alive. That........(sorry, but I did say occasionally angry) SHIT, needed to go right about the time it got started. Black foke been tellin' y'all for years that it will always have embedded biases that skew strongly against certain students of various backgrounds, and will never truly achieve the goal of NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND while worrying so much about the classroom teacher.
These tests have never been equitably done or tangibly assessed, and now they are full of Common Core word problems that are extremely easy for the schools who've embraced Common Core curriculum and even harder for schools that have not. The testing that children should receive regularly as it relates to internal educational goals can, and should be catered to provide the data we seek so that we can finally stop testing teachers while pretending we're assessing kids.
TRAIN THEM OR FIRE THEM.
Now.
Back to civility.
The issue of teacher training has always pointed directly at school administration which is often times a lifetime achievement group of teachers who've paid their dues in the classroom, and really really love kids and education, but don't always have the confrontation skills to force the needed curriculum changes like Common Core because they are now the boss of the same teachers they were peers with before.
This trend is extremely common in education and contributes to the reason why good classroom teachers, who would like to pay a few more bills, leave the classroom for administrative jobs chasing cash instead of passion.
Why so many people have decided that Common Core is crap is because so many people were raised in the fulfill a mission, solve an equation, get a factory job that our parents and grandparents remember so well and think might be gone because of crap like Common Core.
If you follow the trends in education, especially the ones that say we are not leading the world in very many categories at all, Common Core has long since been a way of life in the countries that beat us. In Japan, students in a math class may spend the entire day working on one complex math word problem, which is common to Common Core teaching.
Where our parents were shown how to do math, asked to do it themselves and then asked to explain their method, Japanese math students (much like our kids now) have to tackle the problem all by themselves while the teacher sits close by to analyze the manner in which they've solved a problem before the teacher shows them the various known methods of answering the question at hand.
On occasion, students who learn this way might discover an answer to a question that was not originally expected.
That's the point of Common Core. To be a thinker and a problem solver and not just an equation do'er. Whenever I struggled the most in math, it was finding the focus to figure out why I needed to know this stuff in the first place when my stomach wouldn't stop growling before lunch. Even our greatest teachers (R.I.P. Mr. Troutman) who could take a ball of string and make geometry come alive couldn't keep it from being a question answering session instead of true critical thinking practice.
When education is already answering real world questions, there is no longer a lingering battle with Why- only distracting belly growls.
(HAVE YOU SEEN GOOGLE CARDBOARD?....WOW!!)
Maybe I can explain it to you another way, like our teachers had to do back in the day when we didn't fully connect with their first example.
I was desperately trying to get hip with the new generation by downloading the Instagram app onto my phone, but I needed to let go of one or three of my golf course navigation tools. When one of my basketball players that I coach heard me grumbling over too many apps on my phone and where to find that app eraser, she calmly but sternly cut me off mid-speech and said;
"You can never have too many apps!!"
At the time, I wanted to take my phone that I couldn't really figure out how to erase apps from, and show her the message saying delete something if you want to add Instagram- yet she said it in a way that was like, teaching me something, or something. Due to natural impulse, I almost started a devils advocate debate with her but I didn't know where to start nor did I see a clear path to victory.
So I slept on her words, finally found the screen that allows you access to every app, and proceeded to realize that my note pad and calendar and everything that lives on the phone, accessible with the touch of a finger, IS AN APP that somebody created once upon a time ago and got paid for their idea.
An old world of manufacturing and farming and hard labor was probably under challenging for the quality of education that we and our parents received. In this new world where hard labor is going overseas or captured by immigrants, creating new industry is the new industry; one in which outside of the box thinking is the norm and no longer the exception.
Come to think of it, with the necessity for critical thinking we could probably create an app on our phones that helps us practice this skill in the form of some Facebook game like Candy Crush. Scientist have created a game that is a brain boosting app designed to help Alzheimer's victims exercise their brains, but can also detect the potential for Alzheimer's as well.
Without Common Core, America will have to buy an app for that instead of create the app for that. Common Core is giving our kids the mental bandwidth to globalize and capitalize on these opportunities of necessity. If you are still living inside of the box, you are losing bandwidth so fast its scary.
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I'm All For Common Core
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