That seems to really be the question these days. Conform to Common Core...
When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me that the Conform! thing was a problem in her school, all the way back to first grade. So this an old and sad problem.
I expect my kids to conform to certain reasonable behavioral norms. Like Bostonian said, chaos is bad.
That said, some years ago, my son was embroiled in a kindergarten recess scandal called "the haunted bathroom." It involved turning the lights off (there were windows in this bog) and tossing dry bog roll "ghosts" around while saying, "Wooo-ooo-ooo!" (something about the strips of bog roll looking ghostly while wafting down to the floor). I believe that the intended "victims" of the haunting turned themselves into ghosts, so as to partake of the general spookiness.
The administration was
deeply concerned about this
very serious situation. They sent an email home. The parents did not share their angst. They followed up the email with a letter. There was talk of a meeting. The parents felt that the administration would have best handled the situation by turning the lights on, making the kids clean up the bog roll, and telling them not to waste stuff that is made from trees. The administration finally ended its campaign against the perpetrators of the HB due to everyone else's complete lack of interest in pursuing the case.
Anyway. Conform! Or then again...maybe not.
I wanted to add a comment about the Common Core standards being very different from Common Core eduproducts made by Big Ed companies like Pearson. The standards were created by knowledgeable people who thought very carefully about what kids should know, and took a long time in committing these ideas to paper. I will go out on a limb and say that the same is not true of Pearson's contractors, who are underpaid to (quickly and on deadline)
produce CC-aligned subject content,
create personalized learning systems, and
deliver platforms that facilitate subject mastery (tm).
It's easy to recognize an eduproduct. It comes with a sparkly sticker that announces "
Common Core Compatible!
" The eduproduct itself is shiny, friendly, and welcoming, so as not to frighten students away from scary subjects. These products (aka "deliverables") are also replete with pictures of exotic animals, superheroes, ancient monuments, and suchlike. Given that the photos are tangentially, if at all, related to the subject matter, I can only presume that their purpose is to dim the fires of subject-fear while simultaneously filling more white space on a page without having to resort to writing actual information. The margins are filled with
real-world tie-ins, URLs promising "deeper understanding," and a variety of icons whose meanings must be looked up in the Introduction. And finally, if you dig, well...shallow, you discover that these eduproducts are a dog's dinner of mashed up concepts written in a nearly incoherent way. This is especially true of the math books.
Especially the math books.
So please, gentle readers, let us not blame the Common Core itself for the fact that our governments and state school boards decided to contract out
educational content to the bidder with the shiniest stickers.
More bubble tests, anyone?
