Hello. Anyone? I need help and some trust from this community.
This is for ALL of our kids! Please, listen.
I don't know HOW to get this out to anyone who will care or make a difference, but I got an early copy of the Middle School, grade level breakdown of the new National Science Standards and they are wrong -- grade level-wise.
Wrong how? The standards are great! They just made a small but HUGELY critical mistake, and it's giong to screw up years of our kids.
The mistake: They put all the chemistry and physics standards at the 7th grade level ... with the "testing boundary" that the kids won't have to do any math when they get tested for the principles. WTF? They had to pull OUT testing them with "math" since the math Common Core doesn't match the grade level. The MATH is at the 8th grade level!
Soooo, the kids are only going to get chemistry and physics at the principle level ... BUT, 7th graders's BRAINS --- that year, that critical year -- are just going through moving from concrete to abstract reasoning!
AND, 8th grade, now has NO. I repeat NO physics or chemistry! Just when they will be getting the math and their BRAINS are ready for it --- nada.
There is an EASY FIX! If you have a kid or care about our country's science abilities come over the squiggle.
The easy solution: The 7th grade standards need to move to 8th grade and the 8th grade standards can move to the 7th grade.
I don't know what to do!
I could give you all my resume. Yeah, I know, why should I be taken seriously about this? Lots of smart people put this all together.
Well, this just may be the one situation in a national decision that I think I just may know better and actually have a better cross-life resume to say I may be THE best expert in the country to actually KNOW we are about to do something horribly WRONG as a nation.
This is a HUGE disaster for your kids, and middle school teachers have not even gotten the middle school roll-out formally -- YET they are going to be expected to roll-out these standards without a "cross-walk" of the stnadards over time- THIS YEAR.
I'm crying, guys. I'm looking at a simple shift, fix.
But, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen,
And, it will be a disaster. Just because they are going to force down content to a level where HUMAN kids's brains are simply not ready for learning abstract thinking by ONE year.
By ONE year!
The new, wonderful standards won't work, because there will be a BIG mess up n their middle school years.
No on will listen to this or me. I'm a really good Instructional Designer with 20 years in Industry, a VP at GE at one point, and 8 years as a middle school teacher in science at all 6th, 7th, nd 8th grade ...
A generation of kids of will not "get" what the hell the teachers are trying to teach them and the teachers are going to be thoroughly frustrated and the whole point of the wonderful national standardswill fail.
A simple fix is availabe, but that means teaching our middle school skids bsed on who they are -- THAT is how important they are and how awful ignoring them is.
Is anyone listening? Does anyone know HOW I might stop this from happening?