Common Core Wars: The English Teachers Strike Back - Blogcritics ...

With the new Common Core State Standards now being recognized by forty-six states and three territories, there is a gradual awareness among non-educators that this is something big. Students and parents have been hearing about it for a while now. Schools have held meetings, and there are numerous resources online for people to find out what they need to know. My recent Google search gave me 10,100,000 links within three seconds, so there is plenty from which to choose if you need to know more.

The funny thing is that everyone has gotten so excited about the CCSS that they have lost sight of an underlying truth: no one has reinvented the wheel here. The best practices that teachers have been doing since the one-room schoolhouse are the same as always. The notion of reading, writing, and arithmetic may seem antiquated, but that is what the new standards are all about. This is just a new way to do an old thing, maybe not better, but with an awareness that was perhaps was not there before.

As it has been most of my adult life, my concern has to do with writing. The CCSS set the goal of teaching ?skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.? There is no more important skill students can have than to become proficient writers, with assiduous attention to things that matter like punctuation, grammar, and spelling. I do think that the standards lead students to the well, but getting them to drink is another story.

Let us look back a bit at how we all become writers. We do not sit and listen to our parents speaking as babies, and then as little kids decide to pick up a pencil and write. The in between step is that our parents ?read? to us. Reading is the most essential part of the writing equation, and it is necessary and compelling for kids to be hearing books and seeing us read from them when they are in their infancy.

I recall sitting with my son and giving him a bottle with one hand while reading a book with the other. He did not just sit there and stare into space as he sucked down that milk; he had his first reading experiences. I also made sure that even when he sat on the floor playing with his toys that he could look up at me and see me reading books, magazines, and newspapers. I wanted him to know that I valued reading, that it had an important place in my life, and I wanted it to matter in his life as well.

Source: http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/common-core-wars-the-english-teachers/

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