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Teacher worship can only go so far. Because this post makes the claim that all teachers should be looked up to. My entire family consists of teachers. They kn

Teacher worship can only go so far. Because this post makes the claim that all teachers should be looked up to. My entire family consists of teachers. They know who the bad teachers are. You've got Paulina Pensioner who just shows old VHS tapes as a history cirriculum. Or Carl the Coach that knows, just knows there's only one way to solve this pre-algebra problem. And some teachers work hard. They bust their ass and bring grading home and lesson plan on the weekends. But they aren't the problem. There's a bad system that keeps bad teachers in at the expense of the good. So they design tests and standards as a way to "firewall" these bad teachers in, to turn their poor performance into mediocre performance. And there's a cost, because it removes the creativity and initiative from the good teachers. I understand that the goal of the author is to criticize common core, but while the conclusion is sound (Core is garbage) the reasoning is not. And the new standards being developed? One of the main proponents is the Council of Chief State School officers. Many (probably most) came from the teaching profession. Who know what it's like to be a teacher. The author gives us some feel-good patronization about how teachers have it so hard and we have no right to impose standards upon them. But these standards exist because we can't fire bad teachers.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago
I don't think Core is garbage at all. I think there's a deeply ingrained culture of anti-intellectualism in US culture that needs to be nuked out of the school system, and I honestly couldn't care less what the collateral damage is.
- steveplace 13y ago
  Here's the thing. You like it when there's wide, sweeping cirriculum on the Federal level... when you agree with it. But what happens if there's enough political pressure (it is a midterm election cycle) to add ID into the cirriculum? Or maybe they look at feel-good math that is just teaching to the test [1]? And that's the issue. Centralized power is great when you agree with it, but terrible in the wrong hands. [1] http://www.momdot.com/common-core-is-making-me-stupider/ http://www.momdot.com/common-core-is-making-me-stupider/
  - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
    I agree with your point. I suppose I'm fortunate enough to also agree with the goals of Common Core as they are today. Onto that article, however: 1. I never use an academic degree as an indicator of intellectual capacity. I find that some people are so objective-driven that they zoom right past the point and straight to rageville when they don't understand something. 2. A simple Google search on front-end estimation would have helped this mom realize that the example given on the sheet is incorrect. I will concede that an effective teacher would have realized that the example given is incorrect and would have corrected it. (In front end estimation, you round the leftmost digit, so the example should actually be 400 + 300, not 300 + 200). IMHO 700 is actually a decent estimate for 645, so I don't think there's a problem with the math itself. It's not really feel-good math, but I think some people take for granted that estimation is not an innate ability. Now, it becomes another discussion altogether when the teacher is so horrible that they refuse to accept that the example is wrong. But, I don't think I've seen evidence of that, so I won't accuse anyone of anything. EDIT: I just read some of the comments in that article, and it looks like some districts teach front-end estimation with truncation rather than rounding, in which case 300 + 200 = 500 would be correct. Here are a few more things to note: the parents here assume that estimation and rounding are the same thing. That in itself isn't true. More importantly, though, look at the goal of the estimation -- to see if the actual answer, 645, is reasonable. That's not the same thing as asking if 500 is a reasonable estimate of 645. I think the point of this exercise is for kids to say "ok, if I add these two numbers together, I expect to get a 3-digit number somewhere in the ballpark of 500." That is to say: if I add 354 and 291, I shouldn't expect to get 20000 or 7 or 81 or 9750. It's just a simple way of checking your work using a quick, easy method that you can do in your head. Again, I find the value in this -- adding "common sense" to the curriculum is definitely something I can get behind, but I understand that parents who aren't used to "common sense on paper" will struggle.
peterwwillis 13y ago
I can't agree with this enough. The article tries to paint all teachers with the same brush, which when you get to know teachers you realize is absolutely ludicrous. No system is going to perfect the way teaching works, and it's obvious why when you look at the teachers themselves. They have wildly varying educational background, cultural background, social skills. Different motivations. Different methods. Of course some schools are better than others, because a variety of factors based on region and executive management changes the way students and teachers are sourced, to say nothing of prescribed curriculum and funded school resources. So when people talk about schools, or teachers, or education in general in the USA like it's one big blob, I know it's a huge crock of shit. It's highly variable all over the country and even within the same local region. The one thing that is fairly consistent, though, is the passion of the teachers. Most of them teach because they really want to teach. But there are myriad roadblocks to providing kids a good education - and that's in the cases where kids are open to actually learning. But I shouldn't address the elephant in the room of how the culture of parents who don't give a shit about their kids affects their education... then we couldn't blame an amorphous faceless blob of an organization.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago

I don't think Core is garbage at all. I think there's a deeply ingrained culture of anti-intellectualism in US culture that needs to be nuked out of the school system, and I honestly couldn't care less what the collateral damage is.

steveplace 13y ago
Here's the thing. You like it when there's wide, sweeping cirriculum on the Federal level... when you agree with it. But what happens if there's enough political pressure (it is a midterm election cycle) to add ID into the cirriculum? Or maybe they look at feel-good math that is just teaching to the test [1]? And that's the issue. Centralized power is great when you agree with it, but terrible in the wrong hands. [1] http://www.momdot.com/common-core-is-making-me-stupider/ http://www.momdot.com/common-core-is-making-me-stupider/
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  I agree with your point. I suppose I'm fortunate enough to also agree with the goals of Common Core as they are today. Onto that article, however: 1. I never use an academic degree as an indicator of intellectual capacity. I find that some people are so objective-driven that they zoom right past the point and straight to rageville when they don't understand something. 2. A simple Google search on front-end estimation would have helped this mom realize that the example given on the sheet is incorrect. I will concede that an effective teacher would have realized that the example given is incorrect and would have corrected it. (In front end estimation, you round the leftmost digit, so the example should actually be 400 + 300, not 300 + 200). IMHO 700 is actually a decent estimate for 645, so I don't think there's a problem with the math itself. It's not really feel-good math, but I think some people take for granted that estimation is not an innate ability. Now, it becomes another discussion altogether when the teacher is so horrible that they refuse to accept that the example is wrong. But, I don't think I've seen evidence of that, so I won't accuse anyone of anything. EDIT: I just read some of the comments in that article, and it looks like some districts teach front-end estimation with truncation rather than rounding, in which case 300 + 200 = 500 would be correct. Here are a few more things to note: the parents here assume that estimation and rounding are the same thing. That in itself isn't true. More importantly, though, look at the goal of the estimation -- to see if the actual answer, 645, is reasonable. That's not the same thing as asking if 500 is a reasonable estimate of 645. I think the point of this exercise is for kids to say "ok, if I add these two numbers together, I expect to get a 3-digit number somewhere in the ballpark of 500." That is to say: if I add 354 and 291, I shouldn't expect to get 20000 or 7 or 81 or 9750. It's just a simple way of checking your work using a quick, easy method that you can do in your head. Again, I find the value in this -- adding "common sense" to the curriculum is definitely something I can get behind, but I understand that parents who aren't used to "common sense on paper" will struggle.

peterwwillis 13y ago

I can't agree with this enough. The article tries to paint all teachers with the same brush, which when you get to know teachers you realize is absolutely ludicrous. No system is going to perfect the way teaching works, and it's obvious why when you look at the teachers themselves. They have wildly varying educational background, cultural background, social skills. Different motivations. Different methods. Of course some schools are better than others, because a variety of factors based on region and executive management changes the way students and teachers are sourced, to say nothing of prescribed curriculum and funded school resources. So when people talk about schools, or teachers, or education in general in the USA like it's one big blob, I know it's a huge crock of shit. It's highly variable all over the country and even within the same local region. The one thing that is fairly consistent, though, is the passion of the teachers. Most of them teach because they really want to teach. But there are myriad roadblocks to providing kids a good education - and that's in the cases where kids are open to actually learning. But I shouldn't address the elephant in the room of how the culture of parents who don't give a shit about their kids affects their education... then we couldn't blame an amorphous faceless blob of an organization.