Uncommonly Core

My mother has been unable to talk for weeks -choking and sounding like she's drowning.
This spring (and the end of winter) she battled a horrible infection in her jaw, and became weak. Desperately ill. She gave up a lifetime of smoking trying to recover. At 86 this was good.
Struggles with the dark place of this former addiction haunt her-it always has dominated her time and money. She also started having mini-strokes. She's had a major one, so seeing her lose control of her arm, her face, becoming confused, hearing voices was very hard.
Weeks ago I noticed her ankles swelling. This follows some improvement since the horrid infections, but it is a new nightmare- because she's got problem now of a different kind.
I can't afford her three hundred and four hundred dollar Advair per month, on top of other bills from this. It goes on and on. She has a fever right now, this is a big problem I only figured out yesterday because the doctor found it. I'm taking her, well Jack is,  for a chest x-ray and echo today-emergency kind of. She's so ill now.
The hot water heater blew up this morning in a mess of a garage. Caught.
My new kitten is ripping me up with wild attacking as I type.
My daughter just graduated and is adjusting to a job.
Am I college and career ready? Am I facing the new century?
Am I now, with a third of the nation, a disease?

So, it's a strange time to think about "The New Common Core."

Someone added me to a Facebook group called "Badass Teachers" it has members who I admire and a name I think is tongue in cheek, but probably unfortunate. It looks like they've added (and found) a lot of members in a few days. Since I wrote here on this blog, pieces years ago about these things-being mad as hell over NCLB- that they are working on talking about pathology based education is interesting...it's interesting to read teachers on the Facebook posting there.
Why this, how can we that.
Additionally I just read another Facebook friend deciding to embrace "The Core," a far different tack.

Awhile ago I spoke to being in a place where I was reading these CC Standards and thinking about this new and improved thing we have no choice about and have to do.
I wasn't shocked particularly by the list of standards for 3rd grade.
Aware it was going to be too much for most of my students to do in no small part because of 2nd language-but, of course, lacking seeing how the assessment will "drive" it yet-I was just going to think about it awhile.
Soon that assessment will drive it. Of course it will. And we will endlessly test prepare the kids accordingly having that model in place.

Right now these are the things I need to better understand, at first glances.

College and career ready.

yep.  If you read the Common Core this phrase predominates and if you go to a training it's a mantra.
I literally wish I had ten dollars for every time I heard it in a training I attended so I could get on a plane to Paris tonight. I need to escape reality.
I find it curious as none of the folks, so far, I've seen presenting or talking know much about fortune telling and, truthfully, seem stuck in way "olden days." Yet they are going to prepare kids for the future. Nothing in the Core that I could see adequately talked about a "stance" to approach a future career market, one developing rather rapidly. How to get one (a career), what it might look like.
How long would one last?
The only book I ever read doing that was in the past, Abraham Maslow, in his last book talking about the stance of the artist approximating what might be needed by a teacher working in a rapidly tech driven world. So....one thing I wonder about is how the structure of this CCSS actually helps kids into what they will be doing as work. How exactly. I'd say that a small percentage will be entrepreneurs developing the future on the cutting edge. So....I assume this is a very basic notion- they can focus in their primary and high school ed on "college readiness" exclusively as the only paradigm. Not arts, not vocations, not anything but college entrance in a time many really can't afford it but oh well.......so right now what I see in my mind is a lot of parents and children worried about college entrance exams. I assume this CCSS is about prep for that, starting in K, and then somehow workers sorted out for corporate life.

Do you wonder what the future jobs will be in America?


In 6 months my vegetarian daughter was a blogger for a bacon on-line seller, yes bacon, a frozen yogurt server, and now an assnt editor in a publishing house. I'm hopeful- but what would 6 YEARS of work bring for her? Career, how will that be possible to fathom with at least a new job every three months?
Mostly she's needed skills in getting another job.
Then she's needed skills in keeping a perspective on this, and in perseverance.
So I wonder how the Common Core will prepare students for the artful stance they'll need in an uncertain future.
Meanwhile.....

Going deep on multiplication in 3rd grade? What is going deep?
Lots of talk of deep.



A national database.

One of the things being seriously feared by my friends writing on Facebook is of student data being put in a big place of student data tracking. Interesting. Given recent revelations about whether or not every call you make is big news and tracked...I wonder.
You know an interesting thing happened in my last weeks of school when I was giving tons of tests. A child got Dibeled twice. I don't give the test. It was an accident actually. So on one day he scored a score showing him in need of intensive support. A week later he was Core-or showing he'd passed this area completely. 3rd grade may not yield statistics we'd call reliable- but wtf-we haven't dealt with any of that in a long time.
Which score goes in the database so he can carry the label for life?
What say you?

Up or down. Benefit of the doubt, or,  let's face it?

After listening to some Common Core folks tell me that now the students can be tracked, I remind you that now the students will be tracked.

Expository text

Interestingly my daughter spoke to me about this. The Common Core is all about reading factual information, about non-fiction reading and writing. About students learning a world of critical tactics to support what they might dare to say about a passage they were required to read, by using rather rigid techniques for approaching and presenting that text.

You get in these training on Core sessions where you are told that sentences of 124 words are somehow weightier than those of 6, and how the denigration of culture and sustained thought have fallen to 6 word sentences. I tweeted after listening of course. "It was an interesting training."

My daughter, a reader from 3, and a damn great one, ranking in 12th grade as a reader at 3rd grade-had this to say to me about the new love of non-fiction. She, the neuro-scientist, said, "Yeah except the stuff is not written by great writers, and is boring to the point of tears."

Because, frankly, it is. So the Common Core embraces ultimately the written word as presented by  those with no imaginative or artful clue. It's core.


I've never cared for critics.
Not really, they don't create- they deconstruct.
All I've seen in the Core is deconstruction, and a 101 on writing like a critic,  and ultimately it's a really long game in criticism.
Come again on how this builds the future?

This is creative, imaginative, constructive because?
I see Starfall added a bird book.
And in AR now when you take the "Star" test to get a reading level you can press a button to see a prediction of how your child or student rates on a multitude of Common Core assessments.

Collaboration

Top down, mandated, unable to be discussed, enforced.
Required.
And your salary is dependent on it.
Yeah that's a great model.
Of collaboration.
Coming soon to a District Office near you, a good discussion of whether or not this is yet been tested, is effective with your student population, is something you even want to do. (hold your breath)

Loads of collaboration.
Just look at the thousands upon thousands of teachers that got to be involved in writing the Common Core, field testing it, giving feedback over the ten or more years of collaborative, multi-state development.
Oh.
That's right.

It was developed by those who knew better. Opps. Maybe next time we can collaborate.
We admire it so.


Art

In Ventura a woman with no art training, no art background, "leads" the county team in the arts aspect of the Core. Because?

That sounds about like the understanding of the arts I saw within the CC text.

It's nice to say the arts will return when you have forgotten what the arts are.


Oh I'm sorry. I have other concerns- but I have a mom to try to take to her echo.

In fact I am a human being who has a family, with health problems, things troubling me, things making me joyful, and reasons I think education should be our journey as developing humans. I am leaning heavily on literature, combined wisdom, the stuff of my education, in order to face her death and my mortality, short comings.
I'm basically not interested so much at this point, at 54, in consuming, or in rigor.
I'm facing the rigor of not having the money to buy my mom's medicine.
I'm facing the rigor of watching violence all around us in the insanity of man's inhumanity to man.

I recall a simple poem this morning, far less than 124 words per sentence of a few plums in a bag.
I stay in the moment with William Carlos Williams, and a poem about the here and now. I fade into thoughts of light seeing the impressionists genius in reducing painting to understanding the effect of sun on our perceptions. I stagger over to do wash and deal with a broken water heater- laughing at my kitten ripping me senseless with his claws thinking of Archy and Mehitabel and her line "What kittens?"

I rest my weary head on Langston Hughes for a minute-he was traveling our world recounting that here and there are indeed different realities.

All Common Core seems to me to do is to propose that we can make standard something infinitely varied, unknowable, and as yet unseen.
The art of the profession of teaching-the unique meaning of human connection, interpretation-this is hard stuff to describe. Not in the Core.

But is it ever good to drag around in manifesto's ? I don't know.
The Core reads like one though.
A rather boring one at that.

But, of course, that's just observations.

From A Day In The Life.