The Scientific BS Surrounding Common Core and Teaching Vocabulary
I am going to be a BS detector. The Common Core State Standards are made to appear complicated. Fancy codes and scientific sounding big words are used to wow the public. But if you look at the standards, they’re nothing innovative or new!
Take vocabulary. Teachers have been teaching vocabulary since the beginning of time. Go west and you can see pictographs, a phrase or idea, on the cave walls from Puebloans (or Anasazi) Native Americans.
If you have been a teacher of reading or language arts, even math, you have always taught vocabulary. Yet, to hear Common Core aficionados (devotees, enthusiasts, fanatics—I know my vocabulary) talk, Common Core is necessary to suddenly help teachers teach vocabulary!
Here’s a passage from a popular Edutopia article about Common Core and vocabulary.
Following are 11 strategies, supported by education and memory research, for teaching critical CCSS words while keeping the cognitive verbs in mind: analyze, evaluate, compare, delineate, etc. Cognitive verbs require processing skills that are automatic (unconscious) to free up working memory space, the area in the brain that The Scientific BS Surrounding Common Core and Teaching Vocabulary:
