Story Hour In Rockwood
Last night I attended a district sponsored meeting about Common Core. They announced it in advance to the high school parents and planned it for the hour before the Open House began, thus ensuring that the meeting had a limited time frame. Parents were treated to about 40 minutes of a lovely fable about where Common Core standards came from and what they would do for our children. It went something like this.
Somewhere in a distant land not too far or too different from here, a group of teachers (like us) and parents (like you) and researchers (who are undefined but obviously brilliant) sat around a table and thought about what we should be teaching our children. It is a good thing they did this too, because this had never been done before. To reinforce that point they showed a short video about two peole getting stuck on a stalled escalator who could not think of an alternative way to get to the top of the stairs. This was meant to show what education had formerly done. It taught students one set of facts. When presented with a different problem, they were incapable of applying their knowledge to find a solution. We parents could all laugh at the characters on the stairs and recognize them as the requisit simpletons in many folktales. In doing so, we were expected to accept the premise of education before common core.
This description of students obviously does not explain how we got to the moon, a place we had never been before under conditions that were in many ways theoretical. It does not explain the invention of the cell phone, or this child's invention of a new test for pancreatic cancer at age 15 but, hey, this was a fable.
Somewhere in a distant land not too far or too different from here, a group of teachers (like us) and parents (like you) and researchers (who are undefined but obviously brilliant) sat around a table and thought about what we should be teaching our children. It is a good thing they did this too, because this had never been done before. To reinforce that point they showed a short video about two peole getting stuck on a stalled escalator who could not think of an alternative way to get to the top of the stairs. This was meant to show what education had formerly done. It taught students one set of facts. When presented with a different problem, they were incapable of applying their knowledge to find a solution. We parents could all laugh at the characters on the stairs and recognize them as the requisit simpletons in many folktales. In doing so, we were expected to accept the premise of education before common core.
This description of students obviously does not explain how we got to the moon, a place we had never been before under conditions that were in many ways theoretical. It does not explain the invention of the cell phone, or this child's invention of a new test for pancreatic cancer at age 15 but, hey, this was a fable.
Then we were introduced to a new character, the Modern Learner. The Modern Learner can solve "real world problems." Again, an example was shown of a very young child who needed to recharge a vacuum. Not knowing where the vacuum's charge cord was, she stuck a cell phone charger into the motor vents of the vacuum. This is how the