matching tracksuits

Conservatives around the country are expressing dismay at the implementation of the Common Core Standards, a set of educational standards that forty-five states have adopted. Some of the concerns are philosophical-political worries about excessive Federal control, about the perception that the Federal government is taking control of something that should be in the hands of the states. Ironically, one of the ideas conservatives have been pushing for years was a major impetus the adoption of the Common Core Standards (CCS). Conservatives have long wanted performance-based testing as a measure of teacher and school success, and many would love to implement merit-based pay. The logic is simple: the better you teach, the better your students' test scores should be. There are a whole host of problems with this approach, but I'm not delving into those right now, tempting though it may be. Instead, look at the problem state standards have when used for measuring teacher success:

• States have different standards. That means we're trying to look at for the same "success" markers through a whole variety of different metrics.
• States have different tests. South Carolina, for instance, is known for having a more difficult test than neighboring states. This means that according to these tests, South Carolina schools are doing worse than its neighbors when in reality it's just a question of test bias.

The CCS implementation is an attempt to use a uniform measure for all states, simple as that.

More specifically, though, many conservatives have a problem with how they perceive some of the methodologies that the Common Core Standards encourage teachers to implement. For example, the CCS pushes teachers to get students to perform close readings of texts. Wikipedia gives as good a definition of close reading as I've ever found:

The careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the single particular over the general, paying close attention to individual words, syntax, and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read.

In other words, students are learning how to pick apart texts word by word, to wrestle with the text on an almost molecular level. The problem? The model lesson included for teaching the Gettysburg Address encouraged teachers to avoid giving much background information.

"How can you teach the Gettysburg Address without background information?!" conservative commentators cried.

"What kind of education is this!?" conservative bloggers moaned.

Yet such an assignment is intended to get students to read to understand for themselves. Historically, teachers have been guilty of giving too much background information, and students can rely on this instead of the text itself. Taking some -- and note that by no means did the model lesson say no context should be provided -- of that away forces all students to look to the text itself for understanding, not what the teacher provided before reading.

When we turn to math, the situation is similar. Conservative critics bemoan the fact that elementary level math uses terms like "number sentences" and encourages "guess and check." They eagerly post photos of their children in tears from the difficulty of the homework.

L, of course, is encountering CCS math now, so we're getting a first-hand view of the supposed horrors, and I have to say so far, I'm impressed. Far from being convoluted and confusing, it seems to me that CCS math concepts teach a fluent understanding of basic mathematical concepts rather than rote memorization of math facts.

One problem that L recently encountered had the following instructions:

Choose three numbers to make related math facts. Choose numbers between 0 and 18. Write your numbers. Write your related facts.

"Math facts" is CCS-speak for equation, but it goes beyond that: it teaches students to see the relationships between the three numbers as a matrix of facts rather than a bunch of randomly memorized equations.

It gets them thinking that if 6 + 11 = 17, then similarly 11 + 6 = 17. It teaches them that they can reverse the numbers and change a sign for another group of facts: 17 - 6 = 11 and 17 - 11 = 6. By drilling students in this kind of thinking, CCS-based math seems to encourage students to think of clumps of math facts and see them as interrelated.

As to the vocabulary, using "number sentence" or "math facts" as opposed to "equation" seems to be merely semantic. They're all valid descriptors of the same thing.

Here is a recent example of uninformed criticism of "guess and check."

L has yet to start "guess and check," but I can already guess about the thinking behind that: it's an effort to teach children from an early age how to estimate, something that I find with my own students is a skill that is sorely lacking. Granted, I don't teach math, but I use math in the classroom from time to time. For instance, as we're nearing the end of the third quarter, we begin informing parents and students who might fail that repeating the eighth grade is an impending danger. To help students who might be facing such a situation calculate how much they need to improve for the fourth quarter, I present them with the following scenario:

In order to pass, you must have an average of 70 for the year, which would also work out to an average of 70 for each quarter. Therefore, you can add those four quarters up to determine how many points you need to pass: 280. Take your first semester grade, multiply it by two, add your third quarter grade, and subtract all that from 280. You'll come up with your necessary fourth quarter grade.

They look at me like I'm speaking Greek, so we break it down. 280 - (first semester grade * 2 + third quarter grade) - what you need to pass. Then we plug in some hypothetical numbers: 280 - (68 * 2 + 63) =  x. "So what's 68 times 2?" I ask. Blank looks. No one has ever taught them the multiple ways you could estimate this in your head. Indeed, not even estimate: it's easily calculated. 60 * 2 + 8 * 2, or 120 + 16, or 136. You could also do it with 70 * 2 and then subtract. Either way, you end up with the answer in a matter of moments. Or you just estimate with 70 * 2. Yet for so many students, this is completely foreign thinking. (In the above example, in case you're curious and not inclined to finish the calculation, the hypothetical student would have to score an 81 for the fourth quarter to pass.)

Common Core math, it seems, is trying to teach students these skills from an early age by getting them to do it all the time. It's not meant to be a replacement for actually working the problem. Indeed, it's called "guess and check," not just "guess."

For me, as a right-leaning moderate, I find it embarrassing that so many who share some of my other political views can be so very ridiculously uninformed and, quite frankly, can show such a frightening lack of critical thinking. Maybe it would be a good idea for these critics to add "and check" to their own guessing.

It's four thirty; no one really wants to be here, yet at some level, we're all keenly aware of how important it is to be here. Still, we've wished our students well for the day, we're hungry, and really the last thing we want is to sit through professional development -- i.e., a Power Point presentation.

In all honesty, it's a great disservice to the district head of secondary English instruction to reduce down all her research, planning, and background conversations to three words: "a Power Point." Mrs. B has done a superb job helping us all get a grasp on the changes Common Core mean for our teaching, and without her quarterly professional development (PD), I'd be much further behind the curve than I am now. I walk away from each session feeling better about my teaching, feeling I have a lot of new strategies to implement, and feeling generally more confident in my ability to prepare kids for high school. But in the tired haze of a Thursday afternoon, it can all seem just a bit much.

"You want me to teach for eight hours, then sit for ninety-minutes on the other side of the desk?" You can see that question almost visibly in thought-bubbles above every attendee's head. Glance around the room and you're not likely to be surprised at what you see: bottles of various sizes and materials, filled with diet soda, iced tea, water, and various mysteries -- no, not those mysteries -- as well as coffee cups, snack wrappers, smart phones, laptops, watches, jewelry. It's like we're all getting ready for bed and watching television at the same time: we're all as comfortable as we can be without actually kicking off our shoes. The presentation starts, and you see someone surreptitiously scrolling through messages on her phone, someone else looking at the news on her laptop. You hear someone desperately trying to open a snack -- perhaps a bag of pretzels -- without making too much noise. You see two teachers huddled together, finishing a conversation that started before the presentation. You think of how tired you are, of how much you'd like to be napping. And then it occurs to you: "We're just as bad as our own students."

In English I Honors, we've been accompanying Odysseus as he struggles to make it back to Ithaca and his beloved Penelope. We reach Tiresias's prophecy from the underworld and the confusion starts.

‘Great captain,
a fair wind and the honey lights of home
are all you seek. But anguish lies ahead;
the god who thunders on the land prepares it,
not to be shaken from your track, implacable,
in rancor for the son whose eye you blinded.
One narrow strait may take you through his blows:
denial of yourself, restraint of shipmates.
When you make landfall on Thrinákia first
and quit the violet sea, dark on the land
you’ll find the grazing herds of Helios
by whom all things are seen, all speech is known.
Avoid those kine, hold fast to your intent,
and hard seafaring brings you all to Ithaka.
But if you raid the beeves, I see destruction
for ship and crew. Though you survive alone,
bereft of all companions, lost for years,
under strange sail shall you come home, to find
your own house filled with trouble: insolent men
eating your livestock as they court your lady.
Aye, you shall make those men atone in blood!
But after you have dealt out death–in open
combat or by stealth–to all the suitors,
go overland on foot, and take an oar,
until one day you come where men have lived
with meat unsalted, never known the sea,
nor seen seagoing ships, with crimson bows
and oars that fledge light hulls for dipping flight.
The spot will soon be plain to you, and I
can tell you how: some passerby will say,
“What winnowing fan is that upon your shoulder?”
Halt, and implant your smooth oar in the turf
and make fair sacrifice to Lord Poseidon:
a ram, a bull, a great buck boar; turn back,
and carry out pure hekatombs at home
to all wide heaven’s lords, the undying gods,
to each in order. Then a seaborne death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with rich old age,
your country folk in blessed peace around you.
And all this shall be just as I foretell.’

They see the line about being "lost for years," and with with some guidance, realize that this is Calypso and that the blind prophet says it using future tense ("under strange sail shall you come home").

"Wait," they say. "That's what the Odyssey begins with? How is it in future tense?" (We begin our exploration of the Odyssey on Calypso's island in book five, skipping all of Telemachus's search in books one through four.) With some more guidance they realize it's a story within a story. A prophecy in something like a flashback. Which itself is all set within the larger story: a story within a story within a story.

"And people liked to praise about Pulp Fiction's non-linear storyline," I say with a smile, but no one gets it.

Among all the metrics we use to measure kids' performance, the most useful in many ways is the MAP test. We give it at the beginning of the year and again at the end, and in past years, we've set personal performance goals using it as a standard. Average yearly growth for an eighth grader reading at grade level is about three points. Great growth is around seven or eight points. For those a little below eighth grade level, good growth is around six or eight points.

This year, I've conducted an experiment, pairing daily during silent sustained reading students who excel at reading with those who excel at other academic ventures. The idea was simple: the strong readers would help the weaker readers by explaining what and how they inferred things in the article, working together to figure out word meanings in the article strictly from context clues, discussing the contents of the article, and a number of other tricks and practices. We've been doing that most of the semester. Recently, the students took a shortened version of the MAP test and the results merited a Klondike ice cream party: average growth for one semester was 7.4 points, with two students increasing by an astonishing 15 points and one student by 14 points.

It was a good day to be a teacher.