At Considerable Cost

Common Core: What Is It? There are SO many articles and videos warning people of the dangers of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, or CCSSI .   That's right, that's the official name: it's Standards, not Curriculum.   Standards are a part of a curriculum.   They simply state what each student should be able to demonstrate, with mastery, by the end of a school year.   Standards are important as they guide curriculum and the instruction in classrooms. There are currently Standards for Mathematics and Language Arts, Kindergarten through Grade 12 and they are all available for inspection on the official CCSSI website: http://www.corestandards.org/ For example, in Mathematics, there are Standards for Mathematical Practice , which are the general  "varieties of expertise that mathematics educators at all levels should seek to develop in their students..."   These Standards are to be developed across all grad...

“Look, she’s still playing school,” my mother told my father the first time they visited the seventh grade classroom of my first teaching job.   As a little girl, I played school nearly every day, even sending friends home with homework and decorating the door of my room with holiday themes for each month.   I taught elementary and middle school for nine years before I stayed home after the birth of my oldest child.   As part of my training in college, I was trained to analyze each lesson after it was taught and figure out what worked and what did not work.   It became a habit that I maintained throughout my teaching years.    I was a successful teacher, with an organized classroom and I could handle some of the toughest students, but I was barely keeping my head afloat as a mother.    I finally went back to school for all the lessons my teaching years could offer.   Most often, when I see my...

We started our school year two weeks ago.   Things were going great until one day I sold out in math with my second grader.   Up until now, her math curriculum has been entirely hands-on with little paper and pencil.   I decided to give  a standard workbook a try.   So, I flipped through the pages and saw "Skip Counting."   Because heaven forbid you should use big, scary mathematical words, even if they are the most accurate.   Anyway, on one page, students were meant to practice skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s. It went like this.   For the first set, you had about six faces in a row and underneath each face was a blank.   Most of the blanks already had traceable numbers under the faces: 2, 4, 6, 8....   The directions: Count the eyes.   I cringed and groaned aloud.   I tried to give in and do the page with my daughter even though I knew it wasn't right.   She...