My daughter started school around the same time that Common Core Standards were being implemented a couple of years ago. I was relieved and felt fortunate that my kids had dodged the bullet on the No Child Left Behind fiasco. There was obviously something wrong with the way kids were being taught in schools based on the old template because they were not faring well against their peers around the world. As I understood it, a change was being made to make our children delve deeper into science and math and move away from the superficial multiple choice kind of learning.
That was first grade and now she’s coming to the end of second grade and I still feel quite happy with the way they’re being taught. There are word problems that make her think. She cannot just take two numbers and instinctively add or subtract them. She needs to read and comprehend the problem to decide what she needs to do with those numbers to arrive at the answer. I love that my child is being challenged and occasionally sheds a tear because she has to explain in words her math calculations. There is more emphasis on STEM (Science, technology, engineering and math education.) I’m not sure this has to do with common core but there is more awareness and training on STEM that seems to have coincided with the introduction of common core. There are no timed math tests that made her count on her fingers instead of using mental math strategies. There is more focus on looking at applications of math rather than just learning an algorithm and computing it blindly.
But I can tell that the curriculum will get more difficult and thought provoking as she moves to higher grades.I know this because I have attended several sessions the school has organized to get parents to understand what their children are being taught and why. But all I hear are complaints from parents struggling with their kids’ homework. In second grade. Then of course there are the fifth grade parents who are having a full on meltdown with fists pounding on the ground, legs flailing, because their child is all of a sudden thrown into this curriculum after comfortably working multiple choice problems all these years. No fair! Pout. Just go online and look up some Ted Talks for the ‘tough’ concepts and you’ll be fine, I want to tell them as I march them to a corner for continually interrupting the speaker with their whining. Then there is the ‘well informed’ activist parent who comes with a stack of ‘research’ that shows that our children are being dumbed down because of Common Core, it’s a political thing and the Democrats are out to screw us by treating our kids as guinea pigs. So yes, parents are panicking and using all sorts of tactics from whining to attacking to signing petitions. Just so their children stay in a comfort zone and don’t lose that highly protected self esteem when they cry themselves to bed over a math problem. That their parents couldn’t solve either.
This is also how I know that common core will be good for everyone. As much a learning for parents as it will be for children. Education in the US has not been challenging even for previous generations when they were taught that in a bind, choose ‘b’ as the answer to a multiple choice question. So now if you’re that parent who sits with your child to help with homework but use your fingers to quickly count out addition on your fingers under the table while asking your child to do it mentally, this is a good thing! You’ll be able to leave a restaurant without pulling out the Tip Calculator on your iphone...
