Dear Writers and Executors of the Common Core State Standards: Would you please stay out of my classroom? I would really appreciate it. Why did I bother paying tens of thousands of dollars to go to school for over 5yrs to attain an undergraduate and graduate degree in teaching and my specialty just to have you tell me what to teach, how to teach, and when to teach it by? Seriously--you obviously dont understand about the holistic developmental psyche of a young person. If you did, you wouldnt have written the standards as you did. I know, because I have dedicated years upon years of getting to know hundreds of young people to understand what is developmentally appropriate for them. Because, if you have forgotten, Im a teacher. Its my job to get to know my kids. College and career readiness. Ha. Thats a bit of a joke. If the standards are meant to be college and career ready, you dont know how to prepare young people for either. And you seem to forget one major piece of the puzzle. Education is also meant to prepare young people for life, you know--that thing just beyond their college and their career? I do not believe my kids are robots. And I dont want to make them as such. I do not want to teach them how to think or what to think. I just want to teach them to think. I want them to be inspired to be and do more than they ever expected of themselves. And that takes more than a bunch of standards that are kept together by spit, glue, and paper clips. I want to teach literature, not become a science-light, history-light, current events-light, literature-light teacher. Thats not what Im passionate about, and thats not what I was trained to do. So stay out of my textbook. I want to teach math, not so that my kids become philosophical, hardcore mathematicians, but so that they can have the basic skills necessary to not have to use a calculator all the time. I want them to appreciate numbers, not be afraid of them. I want my kids to be able to work with their parents on their homework, not that my parents must dismiss everything and rely on me to teach them these outrageous methods. I want to teach history. Real history. True history. Not modified history printed in your Common Core versions of history. I want to teach. Whatever subject I was born to teach. And just that subject. Because that is what Im passionate about. That is what I was trained to do. I just want to teach. And I most definitely do not want to be a crony to what the state wants me to be. I want to be free. Sincerely, One Pissed Off Teacher
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 22:38:26 +0000
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