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After work yesterday, I found myself helping a couple friends hang sheet rock at one of their offices. We are friends from way back--one before elementary school, the other since then. At one point we, as is so predictably the case, talked about high school and laughed at our adolescent idiocy. The topic had been broached by a phone call from my 14-year-old nephew who called to report that he did "okay" on his end-of-quarter math test, for which I had prepped him until a few minutes before midnight the night before.
My nephew is an above average student, but the common core math is kicking his little butt. There's no other way to put it. I have been tutoring a group of kids for some years now and the introduction of the common core state standards a couple years ago has drastically changed how schools approach certain topics. Math has been somehow turned from an excruciatingly painful drudge to a near deadly blow to the head. The shear amount of material, the manner and order in which it is taught, and the expectations set boarder, in my opinion, on abusive.
The three of us, hanging sheet rock and drinking beer, were products of the public school system, and not one of us could remember school being such a challenge. And this isn't because of any innate intellectual gifts; it just wasn't that damn hard. I don't think that time has suppressed the bad and allowed us to percolate to the top our most enjoyable experiences, we all agreed that the pressure on us to perform was not at all overwhelming or even to a critical stage. In fact, my two friends were solid C students in High School: today one is an architect, whose new offices in a building he is restoring we were sheet rocking, and the other is an engineer and part owner of a mechanical construction firm.
U.S. News & World Report begins its "History of the Common Core State Standards" with this observation:
For some, the Common Core State Standards seemed to come from nowhere, and appeared to be a sneaky attack on states' rights to control local education. But for those involved in writing the standards, it was nothing short of an exhaustive and collaborative years-long effort aimed at raising the achievement levels of students across the country.
Well, I have a copy of the common core math curriculum and am here to tell you that
U.S. News, again, misses the mark. I realize that trained teachers (of which I am not) might vehemently disagree with me, but in my opinion that curriculum is wholly lacking in pedagogical value; it is as near to worthless as any plan developed by a committee of intellectual wonks. I like math. I use it every day and I appreciate its history and value, but these standards--had I been exposed to them as a high school student--would have had me screaming down the halls of my school looking for the closest exit. At first I tried following the script, but the students were even more confused and I found myself spending most of the time translating. Since then, I have spent countless hours taking the standards and developing lessons of instruction that make some sense to me and, consequently, to my nephew and his friends.
Believe it or not, they enjoy learning about the secret sect founded by Pythagoras, the enduring nature of Euclid's Elements, and Newton's personality disorders. I also don't see the harm in demystifying math--explaining "why" something works the way it works and exploring the elegance of mathematical systems for their beauty alone. Math is hard like learning to play an instrument is hard, and it should be just as rewarding. Unlike my two friends, I didn't enjoy high school that much--but not because it was overly challenging and set me up to fail each day. It saddens me to see my nephew and his friends under so much pressure to achieve and given so few tools with which to manage. I hope that when he gets my age and is helping his friends hang sheet rock that he too will be able to laugh at his adolescent idiocy.
For S, whose hard work has earned my respect.
Grab your coffee and pull up a chair. Was school that hard when you were there?