To Progress: usually to a new way of doing things that can be faster, higher quality, less expensive, and more useful. I am of the age where memorizing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division tables was the norm. Over and over and over again, I remember sitting at the kitchen table with Mom flipping the cards. And when we were done, she’d make me do it again – faster and with more right answers. She wasn’t satisfied that she had done her part until she saw my results – and remarked “OK”. Good enough for this day – but not tomorrow when more and better was expected.
So, Common Core? After watching this fiasco of how our kids are going to be taught how to do just SIMPLE match problems, how the heck bad it is going to be when they try to go to simple algebra?
Oklahoma’s Governor just signed the new law kicking Common Core to the curb – after watching this, perhaps more should be doing the same? I’ve watched fad after fad after fad sweep through the educational system over the decades – they seem to be thrown willy-nilly into the system without good, methodical, and double-blind testing. Common Core seems to be just that on steroids and instead of testing on a small cadre of kids against a control group, the pushers of CC simply want us to accept that it is permissible to put ALL of our kids into that experimental group before it has been tested for some years to prove its efficacy.
It’s all about the money – doesn’t matter where its coming from. And for results, all we’re getting is the old “trust us” bit. Ask yourself – if it was really all that good, where are the years of test results definitively demonstrating its efficacy against Mom’s kitchen table drills. Besides, ask yourself this: what is greener – using all that Common Core paper or doing it in your head? (H/T: The Blaze)
