I’ve just realized this headline can be read in two ways, equally true. Like, careful studying can make you smart; and a bee-sting will make you smart in another way. Isn’t English a cool language?
Meanwhile, five years later, the educational self-satire that is Common Core remains active in a lot of Red states, still damaging children, still wasting the people’s hard-earned tax dollars, still making a festival of ignorance.
It’s a travesty. Education has certainly fallen to new lows.
Well, it’s a satire… but probably not that far off base.
And just think (well, no, thinking is unauthorized, so just feel instead) … After this Common Core generation has graduated and become the new teaching establishment, they won’t even be able to write the tests that they couldn’t pass. 🙂
The tests will have to be post-literate. Like, if you can successfully fog the mirror, you graduate.
Ah, but first you have to figure out which side of the mirror you’re supposed to fog. These things are harder than they seem.
Now that sounds counter-intersectional!
That ought to pop up somewhere on your Blather Bingo card.
This is why, though I’ve taught for many years, I encourage parents to home school. Yes, if the child or teen is in my class or one of my trusted contemporaries, they’ll receive a good education while a changing system slows the progress. At home, especially in the early years, parents have the opportunity to begin their education without a constantly changing system. The children, at home, can learn their basics while discovering interests and sharing with their parents. Parents in turn will understand how their own children think and arrive at understandings. In this way, should a parent eventually send their children to public schools (for the social?), they will know how to help their children when questions arise, but also great communication between parents and their children will be established.
Each year, I am completely amazed at how many students come to my class unprepared. How, I wonder, did they pass their previous classes? That says a lot in and by itself. What this effectively does is mire teachers in teaching to the lowest common denominator, which effectively slows the opportunity to create more interesting and thought provoking lessons, something I did more of in the earlier years. Tests? Yeah. I used them, but only as part of the entire education. I used quizzes, verbal discussions, classwork, and more to assess whether they understood. I also used a variety of lessons, even music an art. I wasn’t interested in only whether they could pass tests. Did they get it? If they struggled with nouns, but they wrote a story and could circle nouns, that told me they understood.
There’s more that I could say on this, and my site shares many of the ideas from over the years. All the best.
I can’t think of anything I learned in grade school that my mother and father couldn’t have taught me much better at home. For instance, I just couldn’t seem to get adding a column of numbers: “carrying” really threw me. So my father sat down with me one night and in half an hour, I got it–never forgot how to do it, either.
That’s why I’ve always been in favor of homeschooling. I guess, even if school were more like when I was young, or better, and the system would allow me to do what I do best: teach and get kids to realize things for themselves, but go out after school and start a small business or project, I would still encourage parents to homeschool. Why? Because it’s their kids and they would best understand them, also guiding them and knowing them well.