I had my experience with Common Core – which teaches math (as well as other subjects) ass backwards…it was developed by a philosopher not a mathematician and most teachers who teach math haven’t got a clue how to teach it because it makes no sense and there is no real training for it…
I call it common “corpse” – here’s a couple of interesting comments that sound about right:
- It encourages the fragmentation of the learning process. Children are best taught initially via ”wholes” not ”parts.” Students need to understand the why and wherefore of a topic before delving into the intricate structure of a learning topic. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote in his book ”The Aims of Education” that students must first learn something through the stage of ”romance” where topics are made fascinating, so that they can then move on to the next stage of ”precision.” The Common Core skips this essential first stage of learning and takes the learning process itself and slices it into hundreds of tiny fragments that in and of themselves have little to entice young minds.
- It represents a heavily ”elitist” approach to learning. The architect of the Common Core, David Coleman, was a Yale graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, and a student in classical philosophy at Cambridge University. He has effectively imported his elitist training by imposing such so-called innovations as ”close reading” on the English/Language Arts Standards. Close reading is essentially a distillation of a school of literary criticism called the New Criticism, a method popular at Yale University in the 1950’s. It places a primacy on sticking to the text of a book and not giving credence to an author’s background, the historical period in which it was written, or the personal ideas and feelings of students. Why Coleman’s personal prejudices and preferences should serve to drive the education of millions of students is an unanswered question
- Very few experienced teachers who’ve taught in the trenches were consulted in establishing these standards. The Common Core has emerged as a result of the efforts of primarily non-educators (politicians and corporate executives) or educators who are out of touch with American schoolchildren’s real needs. The educational ”summits” that led to a standard-based curriculum often included no educators at all. As noted above, the architect of the Common Core was a Rhodes Scholar who never taught schoolkids, and Jason Zimba, the architect of the math section of the Common Core is likewise a Rhodes Scholar with no experience teaching elementary school students.
- It encourages a bureaucratic attitude toward learning and teaching. With a Dewey Decimal System-like approach to learning (e.g. ’ELA.W.11.12.3b – Use narrative techniques such as dialogue, pacing, description, reflection, and multiple plot lines to develop experiences, events, and/or characters,’’) the Common Core appeals mostly to bureaucrats who are less interested in facilitating rich learning experiences in the classroom, and more interested in tracking compliance of students using this Byzantine set of codes as a Procrustean bed within which to confine the bright spark of genius that is every student’s birthright.
For math Common Corpse IGNORES math facts – the basis of all other math – so by the time say 9th or 10th graders are trying to learn Alg or higher math – they can’t even do their times tables – can’t do fractions, or any other necessary thing to move on…essentially, Common Corpse should have been given a burial long ago but the fools keep teaching top down and it successfully keeps the masses stupid – which makes it easier for the Democrats to recruit them…yes, it still exists because the goal of education in America is to keep kids stupid and voting democrat…But the real Party of Stupid is the GOP that allows this to happen. The Democrats may not be smart either but they are sleazy and devious and willing to murder unborn babies by the millions, give nursing home patients a death sentence by sending in Wuhan plague patients – and make every kid in America as dumb as a door knob or at least as compliant as one if that kid happens to have some innate smarts…