Posted on 12/13/2013 12:01:00 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Common Core is full of pretentious little gimmicks, each a potential Pandora’s box of nasty surprises.
For example, there is one called Close Reading, which says that children in elementary school should read the same difficult passages over and over. I didn’t trust this thing from square one, so I wrote an analysis called “Close Reading is close to a con” (link below).
This article was meant to be a strong indictment but to my surprise one of the comments was even stronger. “Domo,” the commenter, clearly has experience in the trenches. Note all the weird little twists. The Devil is living large in the details:
“Good article. I'll add a few points from my research. If you look at Common Core lesson plans, you will discover what "close reading" entails. First, the kids, elementary age, are to read the same text over and over and over again, sometime 5 straight days. The teacher designs activities for the students to discuss each day about the same text. Under the bogus "child-centered learning," the teacher is prohibited from contradicting the text, even if the text is wrong or only offers one viewpoint. The kids are then expected to reach a "consensus" as to the meaning of the text on their own. Whether that "consensus" is factually-based is no matter, apparently. And if a kid doesn't understand, the teacher is forbidden from giving individual attention and must only counsel in pairs or groups. Combine it all and this is indoctrination. Consider one of the texts recommended by our government is the biography of Woody Guthrie, a known Communist who wrote "This Land is Your Land" as a counter to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." Oh yeah, its recommended that, I believe, 5th graders get exposed to communist doctrine. The kids will read the pertinent parts five times and the teacher can't counter the communist prose. There's no recommendation to read a biography of a founding father in 5th grade, but you get Woddy Guthrie. This is just one example. The "consensus" building mimics the United Nations way of governance. Counseling in groups with no individual attention instills the collective mindset. It’s devious.
Consensus building also instills in the child that the child's personal, independent, analysis does not matter...only the group consensus matters. Hence, a generation of followers free from the strains of independent thought.” [end Domo]
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My sense now is that Common Core is exactly like ObamaCare. There are many features that can be made to sound attractive. But in practice, when we see how the ideas unfold in real life, almost everything is going to turn out to be unpleasant. You’ll wonder what kind of people devise such nonsense.
More and more, I think of our Education Establishment as a band of zombies, like those in The Walking Dead.
In that context, I want to mention a new book by attorney Robin Eubanks of Atlanta. It’s titled “Credentialed to Destroy: how and why education became a weapon.” Eubanks argues that “...the reading and math wars were never about how to teach....the new Common Core is actually not about content...the logical, rational mind is the real target of education reforms.”
It ain’t pretty, folks. And I submit that you can see all of this dysfunction in Close Reading and probably dozens of other details in the Common Core juggernaut.
------------------------related material
ARTICLE “Common Core Conspiracy Unraveling?” http://www.examiner.com/article/common-core-conspiracy-unraveling-update
BOOK: “Credentialed To Destroy” http://www.amazon.com/Credentialed-Destroy-Education-Became-Weapon/dp/1492122831
ARTICLE: “Close Reading is Close to a Con” http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/close_reading_is_close_to_a_con.html
[end RantRave piece] .
My kids attend private school.
My kids attend private school.
My kids attend private school.
My kids attend private school.
My kids attend private school.
You sure do like to post stuff you wrote yourself:
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:brucedeitrickprice/index?tab=articles
Nobody else is quite up to your standards, are they?
A good article, certainly not worthy of this sort of HOA-level response. Don’t you have some daisies of the wrong color to remove?
I pointed out a fact backed up with a link.
If it bothers you.. FACTS bother you.. that really isn’t my problem.
I can't for the life of me understand why a teacher would agree to this. If I spent years in school to become an educator I would reel at micromanagement of someone telling me how to conduct my class or my teaching methods.
I would say, you teach your class your way and I will teach mine my way and lets see who's students performance outcomes are better.
It does seem incredible, but they will be taught this too, in their methods courses. As an aside, they've been confusing kids for generations with different iterations of the new math. About a dozen years ago, I realized one of my kids was having trouble with long division. I looked at the materials, and realized they had introduced a notationally complicated method which amounted to synthetic division. The only problem was (aside from it being error prone and slow) that the kids had no idea of polynomials, so it was extremely confusing.
But it's not accurate to say "over 100 diocese utilize a common core curriculum." There's no "curriculum" at this point, just state standards. That's bad, but it's not a whole hog adoption of a curriculum.
In my diocese, the Diocese of Knoxville, for instance, the Supt of Education (Sr. Mary Marta Abbott, RSM) insists that the Diocese will pick and choose what they want, and integrate it into the Diocese's already-established Catholic school curriculum. They've got to pay attention --- she says --- to the CCSS standards, because these will be the basis of the standardized testing AND the College Boards (SAT), which are being revised to match CCSS.
Sr. Abbott says there is a difference between "adopting", "adapting" or "integrating" into the larger curriculum the Catholic Schools have already designed on their own. She says they are by no means "adopting" CCSS, they are "adapting it" and "selectively integrating it".
Is this good enough. No, no way is it good enough. But it DOES meam that some Dioceses --- I think it's fair to say at least 50 of them --- have pulled back, or are pulling back, from just adopting CCSS tout court. They are not completely entrenched. They have no bought into the whole system--- certainly not the whole "curriculum". They are recognizing that there are concerns.
| Its OUR job to escalate those "concerns" to the point where the whole thing looks untenable. |
|
Do not give the impression that it's a done deal, and it's too late to fight it. The time to fight it is while the wheel's still in spin. RIGHT NOW! |
My kids attended Catholic schools 1st thru 12th. What I discovered is that the teachers go thru the same corrupt university education departments. My youngest was in 3rd or 4th grade and I saw her teacher standing in the doorway to her classroom and stopped to talk to her. I asked her a question (I don't remember what, it's been a while) and she answered me in educational-eze, a sort of jibberish that I could not make heads nor tails out of. I had a strong urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her a little and then ask if she could say it in English.
Bottom line: If they are all being trained by the same leftists in the colleges, you would really need a strong principal to overcome the bias.
The libs have been "practicing" their brand of education for quite some time.
They have been "experimenting" on kids in the inner city public schools over the last 20 to 30 years. Ever wonder why those schools are so bad?
Over the last 10 years they have been working the international angle by installing UN mandates in the public schools in New Zealand.
Back in Arkansas, during the 80s, Hillary used a thing called "The Governor's School" where the best high school students were invited for a summer session where they were treated to really weird indoctrination which included lessons on satanism. One student was so upset at what he had learned that he committed suicide when he returned home.
Common Core has succeeded in refining its effort so that all their intense whammy work is on students between the ages of 8 and 11 when it has the best chance to pervert the children.
Common Core, on the computer, will be run and supplied by Microsoft. The plan is for it to be supplied by MS in perpetuity. He is happy--He doesn't care what the rest entails.
He got that part down all right, but he probably left the other details to his wife, Melinda or the Ford Foundation, or a George Soros group. And they, like they did to Henry Ford's foundation, polluted it with their religious (Marxist) propaganda.
Common Core is rotten: It must be rejected.
That has been the goal of public education since the Progressives got their way and took it over in the name of Democracy in the 1890's. Since then, there have been thousands of curricula, hundreds of tests, and millions of methods proposed and tried.
Why, it's as if they can't stamp out intelligence fast enough.
The students I knew in the School of Education were all liberal.
Common Core is the further dumbing down of our students. BTTT!
“I can’t for the life of me understand why a teacher would agree to this. If I spent years in school to become an educator I would reel at micromanagement of someone telling me how to conduct my class or my teaching methods.”
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