At Smoky Hill High School, Common Core and tests not always easy sell
Teaching to the Core | Part Three of Three
AURORA — Yosef Abuharus is sick of explaining it all.
The ninth-grader at Smoky Hill High School just wants to move on to the next question.
He doesn't want to construct a math problem, figure out the answer, then be told to destroy what he built and pick through the remains so his teacher can understand how he got there.
"Teachers will tell you, 'I want to know what you're thinking,' " he says. "Well, when the question is like, 'Four times four,' my thinking is, 'four times four.' I don't like the extra work, the extra pressure."
Yosef's choice of an example might be extreme, but laments like his are voiced daily in his Algebra 1 classroom, where the demands of the Common Core state academic standards run headlong into teenage rebellion and years of being told getting answers right was enough.
Smoky Hill math teacher Jessica Edwards, in her sixth year of teaching and third at the school, has heard it time and again.
She will recite what has become a mantra: "OK ... the claim. The evidence. The reasoning."
"You can't just say something and not back it up," she tells her students. "If you have 8, I don't know how you got there, how you got 8, whether your neighbor got 8. It's not just the answer that matters."
This has proved to be one of the most significant adjustments in classrooms since Colorado in 2010 adopted the Common Core state standards in math and English language arts.
The Common Core — adopted with little fanfare, now a political football — has been advertised as an improved road map to better prepare students for their next step, whether it's college, a At Smoky Hill High School, Common Core and tests not always easy sell - The Denver Post:
