Here is a paper I wrote for Accelerated English about the educational burden, that is Common Core.
(Please don’t take my opinions the wrong way, I don’t have anything against you if you support this new education system. You are entitled to your own opinion and I respect every bit of that.)
A child in America, on average, receives about twelve years of schooling, starting from the age of five or six depending on the parent guardian’s preference. That’s twelve years of adults filling thousands of minds with math problems, decades worth of vocabulary, a variety of facts about the multiple areas in science. Don’t be surprised if you see a student spontaneously combusting from the amount of knowledge they’ve attained in their eighteen years of education.(Please note that, that statement merely was an exaggeration to give you a sense of what generations of generations of educational standards have come to for students. I assure you that homo sapiens haven’t evolved to the point where we can spontaneously combust at our on will.)
Of course, education is extremely crucial when it comes down to enriching our minds to be successful later on in our lives, but the way education is presented to students is something that the United states seems to be struggling with, in recent “studies” done by professors and educators. In terms of education, the United States is in a rough patch. But of course some esteemed persons over the age of eighteen would maintain their own opinion of, “Our education system is flawless in terms of how the curriculum is presented to the students!” But boys and girls in elementary through high school would beg to differ.
Common Core education was introduced by state leaders in 2009 as a way to improve student’s general knowledge and expand problem-solving and other mind skills. According to Corestandards.org,
“The Common Core State Standards are a clear set of shared goals and expectations for the knowledge and skills students need in English language arts and mathematics at each grade level so they can be prepared to succeed in college, career, and life.”
To make this statement evidently clear, the text is essentially articulating that Common Core State Standards(CCSS)will have a set of goals for the students to reach in English language arts and math, with each predestined grade level. Thus preparing them for futures in college, a suitable career; and life.
It seems that CCSS’s main goal is to build off of what a child already has developed and expand it to create a deeper, more extended mindset to cultivate a deeper understanding when analyzing texts or arithmetic that is greatly more ambitious. To further confirm this claim, here is another excerpt from the Corestandards.org:
“These standards are directed toward fostering students’ understanding and working knowledge of concepts of print, the alphabetic principle, and other basic conventions of the English writing system. These foundational skills are not an end in and of themselves; rather, they are necessary and important components of an effective, comprehensive reading program designed to develop proficient readers with the capacity to comprehend texts across a range of types and disciplines. Instruction should be differentiated: good readers will need much less practice with these concepts than struggling readers will. The point is to teach students what they need to learn and not what they already know—to discern when particular children or activities warrant more or less attention.”
Common Core education seems to taking basic and understandable methods of education and complicating our studies and knotting it into a thousand-foot ladder intertwined with brambles. Pricking your fingers as you try to climb higher and higher to reach a decent understanding of the curriculum. But you stumble and the brambles tear through the palms of your skin as the briars are coated with crimson. The vital fluid is a subtle reminder of how you’re slowly sinking into the boiling pool of failure as the heat rises and clouds your thoughts.. Common Core State Standards is an unnecessary addition to school systems across the country and a nuisance in the sense that these “standards” seem to be setting students up to fail. This new curriculum hasn’t been accepted graciously by my brother’s tutor, my parents, or his eldest sister; which is me.
To better understand this issue, research and quiet observation over my younger brother’s shoulder resulted in a fleeting conclusion that could have anyone ripping their hair out at the roots. A simple equation like 7+7 now has a generous amount of fear wafting into a child’s mentality. Seeing as “number bonds” and having a first grader, a child, doing ten times more work than they should be doing.
In an image posted on Twitter, this complicated method is shown on paper:
The question states, “Add 26 + 17 by breaking apart numbers to make a ten. Use a number that adds with the 6 in 26 to make a 10. Since 6 + 4 = 10 use 4.” After the previously stated instructions were read, the paper showed how to get the answer for the equation by using the method described antecedently:
“Think: 17 = 4 + 13
Add 26 + 4 = 30
Add 30 + 13 = 43
So, 26 + 17 = 43”
As you can see, simplicity is now a foreign term in the terrains of these newfound “mathematics.” Using traditional arithmetic would’ve given you the same answer and more practically, without wasting time on numbers that don’t even remotely relate to the problem presented to the student.
Keep note that this problem was most likely designed for a first grader to attempt and decipher. What is this teaching the student? How would an algebra like complexity help with a simple two-digit number addition problem?
To further support my claim, here(beside this paragraph, sorry for the inconveniently placed image)is a picture posted online that went viral, causing an ongoing debate about Common Core Curriculum.
Now turning away from the precision and logic of mathematics, let’s take a look at a subject that is also widely beloved: English.
English is a subject that fluctuates like the sea. Words weaving through one another to create one drapery, to tell a story, to perform a song bleeding with vehemence. Sentences crashing against each other time and time again to calm the readers soul, to enlighten the writer’s mind. Words embody what we scream for the world to hear, just through the way we speak, think, and act. If you’re blessed enough to have access to a digital device, than writing can be more than just your eyes darting across a sheet of paper with writing filling every square inch of space.
Writing and storytelling require no statistics, no straightforward directions on what needs to be done. Yes, their are terms and literature references and methods in writing, but they all are used to expand the way you manipulate the words to create something that can reap emotions from an actual person.. Whether it being fiction or nonfiction, writing can’t be put behind bars and encased to be orderly and compos mentis.
But, Common Core somehow managed to ambush English language arts in a manner that picks apart every wonderful thing there is to writing. The ever fluctuating colours of creative freedom have been turned into a sickly pale norm that would repel anyone. It’s a constant criterion that needs to remember what chromaticism feels like again. Now, the last few lines may sound over-exaggerated and melodramatic, but you must realize that life isn’t just about preparing for the near future when there’s so much that hasn’t been said yet.
In order to “prepare” students for high school level literature, Common Core leans towards non-fictional texts rather than have a coalition of fiction and the latter. The CCSS seems to have a personal and biased preference over non-fiction and there seems to be no clear end. Here is some informational text from edreform.com:
“To complicate an already confusing picture, Common Core also says that English teachers will need to increase nonfiction reading instruction. It is therefore still not at all clear what Common Core really wants English teachers to do. How can Common Core expect students to engage in literary study (or do literary reading) for 30% of their reading instructional time when they are in a high school English class for only about 20% of the school day or year (typically one period per day or a two-period block per day for one semester)? How can English teachers at the same time increase the relatively small amount of nonfiction they already teach and have always taught? It is obvious that they can increase the amount only by teaching informational or nonfiction reading 50% of English class time. But how are they to do so when Common Core’s architects insist that the high school English class should continue to focus on literary study, and they expressly want students reading literature for 30% (not 20%) of their school reading experience?”
The developers behind Common Core have taken to assume that teachers are going about with too many literary works in their classes, therefore having lower than adequate educational performers unprepared for high school level reading and text. This claim is also stated in the same article introduced before:
“The architects of Common Core assume that the major cause of this educational problem is the failure of our public schools to teach low-performing students in K-12 adequately or sufficiently how to read complex texts before they graduate from high school. That is, their English teachers have given them too heavy a diet of literary works and teachers in other subjects have deliberately or unwittingly not taught them how to read complex texts in these other subjects.”
CCSS has given many people doubts about it’s “equal” support of both genres of text, but clearly non-fiction seems to have more leverage than the heart and soul poured into fictional texts that have just as much power and detail as any work relying on the facts of life. Reading itself is better than any organized education system, flipping through countless numbers of pages and actually understanding the words; instead of struggling to decipher the meaning of a single word because the directions say to do so.
Some may argue that Common Core will enrichen an educational mindset, as well as team-building skills, critical-thinking, etc. But many high school students would disagree:
“You’re put into a group and you guys are supposed to try to solve a problem that you’ve never been taught before,” said another. “How are you supposed to do that? None of your group members know what they’re doing, and you don’t either.”
This bit of text taken from chalkbeat.org. Their article explained how Common Core has affected high school teaching methods; thus resulting in them asking students about Common Core and how their opinion stands. As you can see, it isn’t as good as anyone would want it to really be. Obviously, these methods of teaching have only really further confused the students, and the teacher’s themselves. Math should just be math. English language arts shouldn’t just be a set of boundaries you can’t cross.
CCSS’s main goal is to, obviously, help students. But the way their presenting their help is affecting student’s minds in a twisted way that adds so much unnecessary pressure and stress
Now, if we were to break Common Core State Standards, all you really have to do is look at the title itself. The keys words being “common” and “standards,” both of which literally meaning average, ordinary, regular, approved.
Approved.
Meaning that if Common Core education is implemented into your mind for at least eighteen years, what have you really learned to do in life? To, have a five second equation take as long as five minutes and twice the work? To read a fictional book, only to blankly stare instead of truly marvel at their meaning? To never see those crystalline waves crash onto that sea of altercation and freedom. To forever have thorns and brambles burying into your palms as you reach the end of that ladder waiting the end.
We would embody what the United States CCSS would want us to be. To interpret, learn and think, the way they want us to so we could be “successful” later in life. Mind you, the only things it all really is doing is fueling self-doubt and mental burden.
Complicated curriculum like this, is the main cause of stress in pre-teens and teenagers; the complexity of the methods and the added workload, as well as the pressure of whether or not their understanding the forms of procedure can have extremely negative sides on a person’s internal and external health and can have approaching mental effects on the mind as well as the body.
Even if Common Core State Standards Education was extracted from some classrooms in a few states, that still won’t cause the change that students, parents, and teachers are seeking.
The reason I decided to put this into the blog was because this was my first “official” argumentation that applied to a real world topic, that I’ve actually succeeded in satisfying myself with. I initially didn’t even want to choose Common Core education as something to write about, but as I did more research; I just got more and more pissed off. There are so many kids out there who have to deal with this absolutely ridiculous adult logic that was “scientifically proven to improve student’s readiness for high school and further circumstances”
HA
YEAH RIGHT.
The only thing this has proven is the fact that the people at Common Core think we’re all just stupid.
Welp, thanks for listening to me rant about something that rarely even applied to most of you! I’m so sorry, I just needed somewhere to put this out so other people could read this and just think a little more about what students deal with everyday. From kindergarten to 12th grade.
Well, later peeps.