Common Core: the dumbing down of America. Well, I have seen it first hand and not from some bizarre right winged propagandist drooling over how horrible the current administration has become. In our town, there was in the past, an in depth leaf project that each 7th grader (and his or her family) had to conduct. This required hours of identification of trees all around the town as a botany study. It involved the identification and classifications of order, family, genus and species as well as the preservation of these samples. We have never participated in this as our oldest daughter only attended the high school in the area after we moved up here. I just remember doing this in Newnan, GA so many years ago. I have books from neighbors that handed them down for Bella to be able to participate in this annual ritual as their kids had grown and already completed the process. Families worked on these together. I was looking forward to this. Neighbors knew when they saw people walking in their yard in early Fall with a 12-13 year old in tow, what was happening. Our children were learning. We welcomed everyone to gather samples of our sugar maples, red maples, Japanese Maples, white oak, hickory and pine trees. I recall seeing a message from the school system that declared the end of the leaf project as the 2014/2015 class of 7th graders would not conduct this project. While some families breathed a sigh of relief having participated with older children in the past, others have started shaking their heads in disbelief. Me? I really did not care as I was sure the school would indeed have something even better in store. Nope. I was wrong. At our annual curriculum night, I learned that there has been a shift in the MA educational system that while there are tweaks, we are for the most part following Common Core. This will be a 3 year transition (at least in science) as different grades will study the different topics than in the past. As part of prepping the current 7th graders for High School, and to ensure the required Science topics are covered in the next 2 years, Bella will not do a leaf project. There just is no time to squeeze this into the new order of study. I blame not the teacher. The teacher, while feining satisfaction over not having to grade 100 of these detailed projects, was not giving me any reason to think she liked the idea. She was very good at towing the party line, but, I was not convinced she believed it. We were given reasons for the end of the leaf project and it was explained that the new structure would have 6th graders covering cells while the current 7th grade had to cover cells this year and even the 8th graders were facing a different set of topics. Something had to give in order to meet the soon to be mandated MA laws that are based on Common Core. The new goal was to teach the students to think about the bigger picture, like causes for global warming (dont get me started on that pseudo-science). The idea of Common Core stems around trying align the educational system to match a global economy and create workers that are able to compete. REALLY? I hope they are not working in the forestry industry, or home building, or maple syrup production, or commodity trading, or big box DIY Retailing, or pharmaceutical industry, or simply selling firewood, as trees are pretty important in those areas. Wow ! We missed the mark. I cannot perform my technically oriented job by ignoring the foundations and details of computer hardware, Operating Systems, databases, business processes, system networking, interfaces and software programming languages. If I only approach these topics as a big picture I could get fired. How are we creating a skilled next generation by making the tasks easier and common? As a lovely parting gift (explained as a substitute for missing out on the leaf project), Bella will get to walk outside with her class and sketch what she sees...
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 14:03:29 +0000