Originally
posted by
farmer:
TWAIN sounds like you have had a good experience with common core. Maybe it is not common core i am so frustrated with but more the state of Indiana and how it handles education in general. are the teachers in ill pay raises based on teacher evaluations? I also think that maybe public schools have more problems with discipline than private schools. Charter schools in Indiana have been taking enrollment away from the public schools so there budgets have been cut. I know several teachers and none of them seem happy with the changes that are taking place here.
I'd say my experience with it is mixed, but the negatives aren't necessarily the fault of Common Core, but rather just that there's always a new big push on how to make schools better every 5 years or so, and that means we teachers end up having to re-align everything every 5 years or so, which is mostly making some small modifications, maybe adding or subtracting a unit here or there, and then doing a TON of paperwork to line things up.
There are plenty of negatives about it, so I'm not trying to sound all rose-colored about CC. We went textbook shopping a couple years ago, and our options were fairly limited because the textbook companies weren't all fully realigned with CC yet, so we only really had 2 books to choose between. Beyond that, it's of course those same textbook companies that are the ones that benefit most from all these changes, because they get to re-align their own stuff every 5 years and then try to peddle off new books and resources.
bstrong: I don't agree at all with what you say there. First off, 9-7 is still 9-7. The new standards simply try to teach some real number sense to show the kids what 9-7 means instead of just making them memorize that 9-7=2 without really thinking about that these numbers actually symbolize things.
I said this in my earlier longer post, but again, if I want to do some multi-digit multiplication, I like let's say 199 x 5, I could try to do each digit separately in my head, trying to remember what my tens and ones columns are, or I can realize that 199x5 is 200x5-5 and figure out that it's 995 much faster. That's the number sense that the new style of math seems to be teaching.
Furthermore, how many other subjects can you really just sit down and start helping your kids with their homework immediately on anyway? If I assign a short story for my students to read, most likely as a parent, you: a) have never read the story, and would have to read it to help your kid, or b) read it when YOU were in school, which is presumably at least 20 years ago, and you probably don't remember it well enough to help without re-reading it to help your kid.
I would assume that with the help of the math text that most parents could figure out how the problems are supposed to be done, but people who are good at math assume they know everything about math at lower levels that what they've achieved, which isn't true about history or English. No one assumes they've read every story that a 7th grader is likely to read, or that they know every fact or every issue that might be discussed in a freshman level history course.
Overall, I hope I don't come across as a blind apologist for Common Core. It certainly has its flaws. However, as a teacher, I can tell you that I most likely understand the full positive and negative implications better than most people, and the issues that are the ones that are politicized aren't the real issues. The real issues deal with whether standardized tests really test anything meaningful, and whether it's fair to judge a teacher's salary on how his or her students do, and whether all the extra time spent prepping for a bubble test could be better spent in other ways, and the commercialization of education that is caused when we change standards twice a decade, causing supposed obsolescence of all our previous textbooks, and, and, and.
Not whether the average person can sit down and immediately answer their 5th graders math homework without even bothering to look at the textbook.