Reflections on Teaching
Things I don’t get about Common Core ELA
PTA has posted guides for parents to Common Core. The guides are nicely done, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around something I see in the Sixth Grade standards. This is the first item listed on the guide:
Analyzing how chapters of a book, scenes of
a play, or stanzas of a poem fit into the overall
structure of the piece and contribute to the
development of ideas or themes
and I based on some of what I’m hearing, it may well end up being the most important thing they are tested on:
Although kids were asked to read nonfiction passages, they were not expected to read them in order to learn about the topic. Instead, the goal was to analyze the structural and language decisions, to label the craft moves that authors made. That would have been fine if it had been 10% of the test, of 20%….but it was closer to 70%. Tests end up being the