Wednesday, May 14, 2014

On No Longer Being Able to Keep My Mouth Shut about The Common Core

            You know what would really suck?  Being a doctor and having to get online only to risk seeing your profession under constant attack.  It would be so annoying to have the standards that dictated your action under constant scrutiny.  Can you imagine having researched practices like keeping insulin levels stable during trauma be ridiculed on talk shows and posted by political parties so people could guffaw over the stupidity guiding your daily commitment to patients? Can you imagine politicians demanding that the objectives for patient care adopted by the board that oversees medicine in your state being overturned by politicians because they were never consulted as those objectives were written?  Oh wait…  That doesn’t happen very often, because we appreciate and respect medical professionals as experts in a field who have access to information and expertise that we do not possess.  Though we engage them in conversations where we might question a practice or ask for extra insight because we have heard contradicting information we ultimately yield to them as people who took a really hard test to get where they are today.  We trust them to put in the hours and hours of research both in the library and in the field so that we can confidently hand ourselves and our loved ones over to them when only their special training will do.
            I have the utmost respect for doctors.  My husband had an appendectomy last week.  While we were there, the young surgeon explained that burst appendixes (appendices? J) are one of the leading killers around the world where access to medical care doesn’t mirror what we are fortunate enough to have in America.  I felt so lucky and blessed by this young man and the time and commitment he put into becoming a person that could ultimately save my husband’s life.  And this is one of the more minor stories of how medical intervention spared the life of someone I love deeply.  I have watched one of my best friends sacrifice physically, emotionally, and socially so she could become a doctor.  I am in awe of doctors.  This post is in no way an attempt to undermine them.   It is an appeal to the general public to help me understand why teachers are not always held in the same light.  Why is our field not also considered one built on research?  A field that you cannot practice in unless you pass a test and are certified by a board…
                   I tried…  I really tried…  I just can’t keep my mouth shut anymore in regards to critique of the common core and other rants about public schooling in general.  I have watched post after post from friends who seem to be against them because some people they align with are against them.  My gut tells me these posters have not read the common core.  My gut is frustrated. 
                I have read the standards.  (You can too if you click here: http://www.corestandards.org/read-the-standards/ )  Not once, not twice, but at least ten times I have read these standards.  I have read them in a room full of teacher representatives from all over the district.  We read them and underlined them and annotated them and placed them side-by-side by grade and side-by-side by topic.  We asked questions to tease out the subtle differences from one year to the next.  We did everything we could do make sure they were right for our kids.  I read them again in a room full of teachers from around the state as we considered how to use them to improve the reading and writing of students in all content areas.  I met with teachers in Lake of the Ozarks, Boston, and New Orleans to see how to implement these standards in a way that best prepared children to be productive adults.  If you take some time to glance over them you will see they are pretty benign.  They ask that students use textual evidence to support an opinion.  They ask students to read both fiction and non-fiction texts so that they understand the literal and inferential meanings in the passage.  They ask students to consider media with a critical eye.  Math wise, they ask that students understand how tens work and not just to perform calculations with no understanding of why and how numbers do what they to.  After all, any old phone can calculate. 
I went to school for a long time to be a good teacher.  There is an art and science to it. I now teach younger people the methods for my field.  Together we read up to 100 pages a week over the course of 16 weeks together in just ONE class.  These pages represent the best research available in our field so that when we make a decision about a child we make it based on what is proven to work.  And sometimes it still doesn’t work because we deal with human minds which are complex, beautiful and at times unpredictable so we try another strategy or we read another book in hopes that we can do our job well.  And at the end of the day we are often emotionally and physically exhausted so we hop on facebook to “numb out” for a bit and see common core bashing filling up our newsfeed or standards based grading being called the potential end to all that is good in society by people who have not read a single article about either of those things.
 Don’t get me wrong.  I would hate a world where we did not question things like the common core.  In fact, I even find some faults with the standards.   I heard lead reading researchers share similar concerns over the past weekend.  But our concerns are based on both qualitative and quantitative research.  Our concerns are over the demands that are simply too intense for some young readers.  What used to be expected of 8th graders is now expected of 5th and 6th graders. This decision came from people outside of the field of education who thought we were doing a piss poor job of getting kids ready for the workplace so they placed arbitrary and perhaps impossible lexile expectations on youth.  We also fear the absence of poetry, creative writing and other humanities that there was little room for after the cramming of objectives necessary in our push to be constantly better than other nations. 
I will engage in a thoughtful debate with anyone armed with information.  If you enter in the conversation with research you have done yourself I stand to learn from you.  I can question my standing beliefs and weigh them against my knowledge from in the field and out so I can consider adapting my beliefs.  If you simply forward a link, a meme, or a quote because it came from a party you support so you assume it is unquestionably true I will just get defensive.  (The funny thing is that the people most opposed to the common core tend to fall on the far left and far right of the political spectrum.  I find myself wanting to yell, “Hey!  Look you guys!  You agree on something.  Let’s hold hands J.) I hope this post encourages critical conversation.
Dr. Anthony Muhammad helped me best understand the phenomenon of every man as expert when it comes to education by explaining that you begin the apprenticeship for public school teaching when you step foot in your first classroom at age five.  Everyone’s years spent in the classroom seats afford an inside look not common regarding other professions.  (I have no idea what my good friend does all day at Edward Jones though I know she works hard).  But things look different from the other side, I promise you.  We know things on the other side that we don’t expect you to know.  We get paid the “big bucks” in hopes that you will yield to us.  Please, question and push us as you would anyone caring for your loved one, but trust and respect us as well.  There is simply too much work to be done in this world for us all to carry the burden of all the necessary human preservation tasks.

Because I am having trouble bringing this full circle, let’s go back to a comparison with doctors.  It might help you end with a little chuckle:

“If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job.” Donald D. Quinn

And I love that job…



Disclaimer – So many people in the world have made me feel respected and appreciated as a classroom teacher.  Either way, I hope this is food for thought J

No comments:

Post a Comment