Take a minute and forty-eight seconds and watch Funny or Die's common Core spoof.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFOgDBl4Po
Now that's some funny stuff and sadly it gets it completely wrong too.
I have heard several Common Core theories which quite frankly I thought were Mel Gbson Conspiracy Theory crazy but I also heard my own superintendent say the following.
At a community meeting an exacerbated couple said they couldn't help their elementary school aged child with her math. They had hired a tutor to help her and they wondered what else they could do.
My super said that they (the district) would be setting up a math hotline to help children and hiring a tutor was great.
Problem solved right, just have a parent call the hotline and/or hire a tutor.
Except what if they can't afford to hire a tutor, or they work nights and can't call the hotline, or they don't know the hotline exists or they live in a county that doesn't have the funds to set up a hotline?. Or a child's parent's just aren't all that involved in their student's school work? Or a dozen other scenarios? What happens then?
We have disenfranchised millions of parents from helping their children do the most basic of computations and that's not funny. If a parent is unable to help their child then we have lost the battle and that's whats happening all over the country.
The cure of common core at least in math anyways is worse than the disease.
I will just throw this in too but I have also seen no evidence that the countries we are trying to catch use anything approaching common core and if they aren't then why are we?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFOgDBl4Po
Now that's some funny stuff and sadly it gets it completely wrong too.
I have heard several Common Core theories which quite frankly I thought were Mel Gbson Conspiracy Theory crazy but I also heard my own superintendent say the following.
At a community meeting an exacerbated couple said they couldn't help their elementary school aged child with her math. They had hired a tutor to help her and they wondered what else they could do.
My super said that they (the district) would be setting up a math hotline to help children and hiring a tutor was great.
Problem solved right, just have a parent call the hotline and/or hire a tutor.
Except what if they can't afford to hire a tutor, or they work nights and can't call the hotline, or they don't know the hotline exists or they live in a county that doesn't have the funds to set up a hotline?. Or a child's parent's just aren't all that involved in their student's school work? Or a dozen other scenarios? What happens then?
We have disenfranchised millions of parents from helping their children do the most basic of computations and that's not funny. If a parent is unable to help their child then we have lost the battle and that's whats happening all over the country.
The cure of common core at least in math anyways is worse than the disease.
I will just throw this in too but I have also seen no evidence that the countries we are trying to catch use anything approaching common core and if they aren't then why are we?
I have met a couple of parents who have called the hotline. Long wait times and essentially a scripted answer is all they received. They no more understood how to help then before they called. Parents that speak little or no English are faced with an even bigger challenge. Students that value the reward of getting their homework done- either intrinsically or extrinsically- will burden the stress of an incomplete. We should not need a homework helpline for elementary-aged homework. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that promotes hiring a tutor to help a primary-aged child compete basic math computations. We don't need to spend money on tutors or hotlines, we need to spend money on a curriculum that works and then let teachers use their degree to actually teach that curriculum. It seems so simple, yet so unattainable?
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