Does President Obama Know?

The Washington Post has a great column here asking if President Obama really understands the havoc his education policies are causing.  I have to say that while I admire and respect President Obama, I am very concerned that his Race to the Top, and now these Common Core Standards are not good for children.

In my 37 years of teaching high school English, the truth that became engraved on my soul, was that students only really learn when they are engaged and excited about the subject.  If they are bored, or if the material is too difficult, they find various ways of avoiding assignments:  copying from friends, downloading Internet material, watching a video, etc.  Then, of course, they learn nothing.

Our main goal should be to develop a love of learning.  When children become excited about something, they can quickly learn endless amounts of material.  Ask a child to describe his favorite video game to you. 

A love of reading, and an excitement about learning new areas of knowledge will stay with children their whole lives.  Material learned under duress for a test is knowledge quickly lost.  

Let's Assign Bud, Not Buddy to the Whole Country

Ed Week has a column here advocating that the country adopt not just the academic goals of the Common Core, but a common curriculum as well.  This would save students from the horrible possibility that they might have Charlotte’s Web read aloud to them in second grade, and then transfer schools and have to hear it in third grade as well.  (I’m not making this up.)

Oh my heavens!  Thank heavens I have already retired! This suggestion—that all titles students read be decided by some central committee--will really put the lid on any hope of a significant gain in reading scores.

There is a multitude of research showing that the best readers are the avid readers.  Check the work of Professor Stephen Krashen, of the University of Southern California.  And that has certainly been my experience, during my 37 years of teaching high school English.

We need to help students acquire a love and habit of reading.  In our video culture, this doesn’t happen naturally anymore, for most students.  Unless students already have a rich, independent reading life, assigning them titles to read in class will simply harden their dislike of reading.  And most students simply won’t do the assigned reading.  With the whole country assigned the same book, there will be so many videos of the story, so many “study” notes, so many Internet summaries, that avoiding the text will be the easiest thing in the world.  Most kids won’t read anything.

Read this current English teacher’s take on material developed for the Common Core standards in English:  http://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-common-cores-supposed-emphasis-on.html

And I don’t even begin to address the impossibility of ever picking out titles appropriate for the whole country.   

Nostalgia and Education

The New York Times has an interesting column here about the dangers of nostalgia.  A psychologist studying the phenomena found that people who could view their childhood realistically--rather than with rose-colored glasses—were more successful as parents themselves.  

This is a very interesting insight by Professor Coontz.  As a high school teacher for 37 years, I can see now that nostalgia is behind many of the “new” education reforms.

I think the nostalgic belief driving these reforms is that in the old days students studied hard, while wearing uniforms and sitting in desks neatly lined up in rows.  Teachers were hardworking and strict, with none of this nonsense about union protections.

The reality was that whole populations of children were left behind in the 1950’s.  Special Needs children could be—and usually were—excluded.  African-American children were in abysmal schools often without textbooks.  The only reason that scores were reasonably high was that children still turned to books for their entertainment, rather than television or video games.

I’m afraid with the assessment and curriculum guides being mandated under the Common Core, we will leave another whole generation of children behind.  We need to look behind the nostalgic veil covering schools sixty years ago.