The Discovery of the Age
You know what? I can't get this bizarre Common Core conversation video posted on TuttleSVC out of my head. Scroll down the post and watch it; it doesn't take long. If you have half a brain, or if you've taught English for more than five minutes, you'll be mesmerized.
Basically it's a group of people who appear to have never dealt with a group of actual teenagers talking about something that doesn't exist in nature; that is to say, Tier I words and Tier II words. And then they talk aboutgiving kids access to words, which I think is bizarre; and then they talk about how it's going to be this big shift for teachers to start talking about the impact of word choice. Which is evidently something that nobody has ever done before, in spite of the fact that English teachers and social studies teachers have been doing this very thing forever, and that it's a thing covered in every state's pre-existing standards, albeit in different words.
I think the underlying assumption of the surreal conversation in the video is that teachers have never before