Well, on a bad day, writing could be and still can be painful.
Calling it idiosyncratic certainly seemed like a criticism and your reply seems to reinforce that. i.e. If it is not idiosyncratic, then your compliant of āvendor lock inā has no merit.
I donāt really see what it is that you have issue with here. That isnāt a standardized, context free, exam like the SAT is. It is a test for kids in a class who have all had the same teacher and curriculum. The kids need some implementation and it will have implementation details.
I get that you are mostly worried about vendor lock in and it all becoming a cash cow for Pearson. There might be something to that, but there are other implementations. For example, a friend of mine is the lead mathematician for another one ( http://commoncore.org/maps/math ) which actually comes from the common core organization. Presumably other publishers will come out with their own versions soon and Pearsonās version wonāt be the only game in town.
I have a kid in the NYC public school system who just finished the tests. He was also a student in Japan for three years, so weāre able to compare our experience there and here. I wrote a blog post about how weāve navigated this. I donāt have any top-level political anaylsis, just a practical summary of how I dealt with being in this system. He did well on the tests, and the benchmarks of the common core were helpful for us. I agree with a lot of the bigger criticism of the system, but since weāre in the system Iāve had to spend most of my time on how to get the most out of it despite its flaws.
The post is rather long, so Iām posing a link instead of filling up the comment here:
as a texan i apologize to the rest of the country for what we have wrought on education. in the early 80s h. ross perot managed to panic the legilature into thinking there was a crisis in education and the texas congress mandated a standard curriculum for the state and a set of tests to make sure it was being taught. over the next 12 years the state gradually increased the ārigorā of the standards and increased the number and types of tests also making the consequences of failure more and more painful to students, teachers, schools, and districts. our governor george w. bush (for whom i also profoundluy apologize and promise i never once voted for) brought the testing mania with him to d.c. and a group of republicans and democrats got together and came up with no child left behind which basically nationalized the testing program texas had.
once upon a time legislators would draft, debate, modify, and pass legislation with the knowledge that it would be imperfect or incomplete but that was okay because as difficulties arose the law could be modified and improved. you name a major piece of social legislation over the last 90 years and thatās the way things worked until you got to the late 00s byt which time the republican party had put the craziest part of their base in charge and problems with laws could no longer be repaired because the republican party chose to use the rules of the senate to conduct an unprecendent and record-breaking number of filibusters so that legislation that had a majority of 59-41 could not be passed. thus, the fact that nclb had demonstrated multiple problems did not mean that it could be fixed.
along comes a curriculum called common core developed and promoted by corporate america as something that could be helpful. once it was a curriculum that had broad bipartisan support but with the crazification of the republican party it has now become a touchstone of automatic opposition. my state wouldnāt even sign on as part of its roll-out because our governor considered it a danger to our society. this is the same governor who turned down a ton of free money for the medicaid expansion because . . . well . . . as far as i can tell because he hates poor people and wants them to either move or die which is strange because his policies have resulted in a record number of poverty-line, minimum wage jobs. anyway . .
many others here have already made excellent points about the difference between a curriculum and the implementation of a curriculum and how one personās dumbing down is another personās teaching before readiness. given a particular implementation it could be either or even both. we use the texas essential knowledge and skills (see here-- http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index2.aspx?id=6148 ) and iāve been teaching here for 19 years. this is the second curriculum and the third or fourth revision of this one since iāve been teaching. i donāt know what the solution is but until the republican party returns to sanity or is conclusively voted out of office thereās going to be very little thatās going to change.
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Iām 46, took everything through calculus in high school and majored in EE and this is the first time I have ever heard the term ānumber line.ā
It seems to me standards make sense only to the extent they show what final abilities kids should have at a grade level ā they should not test a particular methodology whether itās long division or a ānumber line.ā If you can divide x by y correctly it shouldnāt matter how you got there.
OTOH, āshow your workā is a necessary skill in and of itself and should definitely be taught to everyone. While it doesnāt matter how you get a result, you should be able to explain your methodology.
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I donāt have a problem with standardized tests and using them for evaluation of both students and the educational system (e.g. teachers, schools, districts, methods, etc.), but it does seem to like there are too many tests, and frankly I donāt understand this should be (I understand why it is, but thereās no intrinsic reason for this to be the case.)
When I was in high schoolā¦ god 20 years ago ā¦ we had both the Iowa Achievement Tests (that it seems like everyone took every year, for no apparent reason) and some sort of Illinois test that was supposedly for determining school funding (in a regime based on local property taxes no less!). It seems like there was also a third test sometimes, but I donāt remember what it was. Now these tests pretty much tested the same things, but if you listened to some bureaucrat they would probably tell you how they were very different, and server very different purposes.
If you want to reduce testing, then you have to eliminate tests, just choose one, any one. Common Core? Fine. Why we havenāt had a national curriculum until now I donāt understand. (Or well I guess I do, since the Confederacy would get upset that they might have to teach science.)
āStandardized Testingā(1) is meaningless and wasteful unless it is proven to correlate with real-world outcomes.
Oh, whatās that?
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/29/307968835/us-high-school-graduation-rate-hits-all-time-high-per-report
(1) That āstandardized testingā demon, by the way, is what all states rely upon when determining which professionals deserve licenses and which are incompetent and should be prevented from swindling the public with their woo. Professionals like, Lawyers, Doctors, Nurses, Accountants, Engineers, Architects, andā¦Teachers.
Charming. Did you bully others when you were in school as well, or is this something you started only when you had the anonymity of the Internet?
So much for an apology.
I wasnāt the original poster. But if itās unhinged to express oneās disgust when one sees verbal abuse and bullying, then, yes, Iām unhinged. Iāll have to assume that heaping scorn on anyone who differs too much from yourself, however, is, in your opinion, completely acceptable.
Interesting that you assume that I must be a salaried worker in order to be defending them. Is it inconceivable to you that anyone would defend anything other than their own narrow interest?
Hold on. What are the requirements for a teacher in the US? Is it not a masters or the equivalent?
It isnāt anything mysterious. Itās Cartesian coordinates one dimension down. i.e. the real numbers are a line. Addition of positive numbers moves you to the right; subtraction to the left. You might not have heard the specific words ānumber line,ā but you learned it at least several years before you took calc.
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Iāve got no dog in this fight either way, but Iām honestly curious as to why you think a dude asking you to expand on your argument (in a poor phrased way) merits such snarky hostility.
Well, yes, except that Iām starting to suspect weāre talking about different things. I am claiming that math students need to learn the proper methods, not shortcuts that work with specific simple problems but bite you in the ass later; and insofar as itās a teacherās job to verify that their students are learning the material, the only way to do that is to make them show their work. School was certainly painful for a moderately autistic hyperactive kid like me, but at 35 Iām better off in every way for getting an education instead of playing video games for the rest of my life.
But it sounds like your actual problem is that your handwriting teacher(s) failed you and you were never taught how to write comfortably, so showing your work was physically painful. I can sympathize with that too, as a lefty; I still hate writing by hand, Iāll pull out my laptop to make a grocery list. But itās not the math teacherās fault that the handwriting teacher fucked up.
āWonderful Teachersā
Thanks for your input āMayaā. You are a āWonderful Posterā as wonderful as āCatoā or with as much āHeritageā as āGatesā or āWaltonāā¦
Actually, thatās a good questionā¦ google books may help you pinpoint exactly when this nomenclature became popular.
Richard Feynman mentions a device very similar to the number line in his criticism of new math. It may have been introduced in the late sixties, early seventies, and survived into the next style of mathematics teaching.
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Well, to put it more plainly, please look over his responses to me with this in mind ā did he actually display any genuine interest whatsoever in what I had to say? In the information I had to offer? In the contribution I extended toward what could have been more of, you know, an actual, mutually respectful exchange? Or did he instead approach with a somewhat aggressive demand for easily Google-able information, and then retreat into what amounts to ābutthurtā when I made the effort of providing it?
I think it was always an issue of what my hands and fingers can and canāt do. I could often write something clearly or draw something neatly, given eniugh time and not too much work, so one teacher decided I was lazy, and one screener decided I wasnāt actually having any trouble.
I also had teachers trying to pressure me to use the dynamic tripod grip. For those who can use it, it is suupposed to offer easy control. But for me it offers no control at all. I find that the lateral tripod, I think thatās what it is, with the middle of the pencil or [in rare cases] pen nestled under my thumb offers control for me. I know there are papers arguing that because people who are clumsy with their hands tend not to use the dynamic tripod grip, or vice-versa, people who donāt use the dynamic tripod grip tend to be clumsy with their hands, obviously not using it causes clumsiness and demanding it from young students would prevent clumsiness. facepalm In my case though itās not just handwriting, itās typing, Iām okay with small knives, but itās specialized peelers, and razors, andā¦
I remember being constantly told I was holding my pen wrong at school. Got told off during handwriting lessons. I just learnt to hold the thing the way they wanted when they were nearby, then switch back to how I was comfortable when they moved on.
Edit: looks like I hold pens the same way you do.
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Most of math class blends together for me until the end of high school. I really couldnāt say when I learned what.
Sure, by then it was the established way of teaching. I just know that the method Tom Lehrer derides in New Math is more familiar to me as the technique for subtraction than what he shows as the way his generation was taught.
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Depends on the school district/state. Sometimes a Masters, sometimes a Masters in the subject you want to teach
I once knew a biologist who taught history while a general education teacher taught physics while someone who DID NOT BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION was teaching biology. High school was fucked up.
Yes. The bottom line is the bottom line. How can this all be more effectively monetized? And who does this benefit? If we canāt demonstratively show that studentsā lives are improved, then what is the point?
Somewhere else in all these posts was a point about improvement methodology, Deming --that sort of thing. Iād like to add that these improvement models rely on incremental steps (fail early and often) and changes based on the lessons of failure. The input of front-line staff (teachers, in this case) is critical to drive improvement that is sustainable. Administrators are there to support teachers, get them the tools they need to do their jobs and remove barriers to success --not to micromanage curriculum.
The measures of success should consider more than short term outcomes (test scores) but trended data (another point that was previously made). These should include: Balancing measures: what are the unintended consequences? Process measures: are we doing what we say we are doing? And real outcome measures: graduation rates, college degrees and level, long-term earnings, health, and --dammit --life satisfaction. Because it isnāt always about the Benjamins.
Anyway, Iāll finish with this quote:
āEvery system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.ā
- Paul Batalden, M.D.
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