Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Common Core

The teachers seemed to feel that they were getting adequate training and would deal.

I'd say fully 90% of the parents at these meetings were disgruntled, confused, or terrified. This in a district that, by and large, for most populations*, does a good job of producing educated kids.

To me, that says that even here, parents aren't sure what's going on in their school, are unsure of what their kids need and how to get it. The overall level of anxiety about education in this country is so high.

Ech.

DeeDee

*I won't get started on the exceptions here.

MON, fascinating. I will be watching for that. We have heard not a word about the discovery method. We have heard about a cycle of direct instruction, practice, testing of mastery, repeat as needed, which sounds like the opposite of discovery method.

I believe Common Core does not mandate how the content is to be taught, only specifying what should be mastered by the end of each grade-- the teaching method seems like something that districts can choose.

DeeDee

My younger kids (4th/5th) have been doing parts of speech since first or second grade. I don't know if their school will get heavy into grammar in 6th grade. When I was a kid in a public school system in New Hampshire, we started serious studies of grammar in 5th grade and continued through 10th.

My eldest has had next to no grammar instruction (apart from in French at a French immersion school that follows the French national curriculum). We found a CTY course that's advertised as focusing heavily on grammar and writing grammatically correct essays. It starts Monday; the textbook is very grammar-intensive.

I find it very odd that schools have de-emphasized this subject.

Interesting. I recall virtually no grammar instruction, other than what I learned in French class. Parts of speech, yes. There was a brief unit on diagramming sentences, which I found annoying.

Of course, we did a lot of writing 5-paragraph essays, and we edited each others' work. But serious studies of grammar? Not at all.

Grammar instruction during my own public school career (mostly 70's) was brief and evidently taught during the gifted pullouts in elementary school.

I was mystified later that my non-GT classmates seemed to all have had such instruction, and my GT peers and myself had (universally) none.

This probably varied regionally/with school district. My daughter hasn't had a lot of grammar instruction, but she'd well and truly outstripped mine by the time she reached 6th grade. I don't even know some of the terms she is expected to know. Gerund?? What the heck is THAT? LOL.

The science standards were developed separately from math and english.... They enlisted a panel including actual scientists to devise a framework for the standards, and then started working on the standards. Due to this process, the science standards are not yet complete. They released a draft in May 2012 for public comment and are now revising. Oh, and for some reason they are not called "common core" officially, but rather " Next Generation Science Standards." But functionally they are common core for science.

I am looking at Common Core for gr. 3 and I can tell you that those standards were not met in my DD's classroom last year (grade 2, doing gr. 3 math using a gr. 3 Common Core-based book). They didn't complete the book, though. But they came pretty close, IIRC, and no way did they cover all that.

So far, I found common core to be a step backwards for the gifted track in both middle and elementary. This track will do all of the same things as the regular track so all children can be on the "common core." A year focusing on pronouns seems extreme for sixth grade. Wow, I must have missed all of that instruction growing up.

They've cut the literature down to make room for short non-fiction pieces, as defined in the "common core." I'm not impressed at all. Rigor is subjective. Maybe common core is an improvement for some in failing or dismal school systems, but I'm not seeing it for my children. I see it as the new fad - it will go the way of mullets and blue tuxedos (no offense to those with mullets - just blue tuxedos). Unfortunately, we will have to suffer through it first. I feel sorry for the teachers implementing this new fad. Meh, maybe I'll be surprised by the rigor part-way through the year - maybe when they get to "it" or "they" the curriculum will really take off.

Ditto.

When we were reviewing Round Three of state content standards, I heard someone from the state department of ed. say that content standards should represent 50-80% of what you teach in the classroom during the year, not 125% of what you might possibly teach in a year. I would agree with that, but it means that quite a bit of content is determined by the individual teacher. Your mileage will vary!