BUILDING THE MACHINE - The Common Core Documentary

This documentary is 39 minutes, just so you know before you decide to watch. It does a good job of giving background on how the Common Core came to be.

 I think that there should be another documentary made about what the Common Core looks like in the classroom. I can not vouch for the secondary grades. From this documentary, it sounds like classes are being dumbed-down so that students can be both college and career ready simultaneously. I can give examples of what Common Core looks like in the primary classroom. I know that my students are usually given a day or two of concrete math instruction, with manipulatives, before being expected to internalize math concepts and perform on an abstract level and provide reasoning, usually in written form, to justify their strategies. I know that my first graders are expected to read a sentence such as, "Dan is going fishing with his dad." and then answer a question such as, "In the sentence, which word is a possessive pronoun? A)Dan B)fishing C)his D)dad".

Teaching has evolved into scripted lesson plans. I have to write lessons that actually state, "Yesterday I taught you... Today I am going to teach you..." and I have to write out what words I will say during a lesson. When I began teaching, I wrote a weekly lesson plan that outlined all the subjects I would teach over the course of the week. It had boxes for each subject, or time period, and I would write "TSWBAT count objects using one-to-one correspondence". Enough said. I used my brain to teach the children, I didn't hold my lesson plans up in front of them and read from my pre-planned script: "Students, today I am going to teach you to count these colorful, plastic teddy bears. Do you remember when we sorted our teddy bears by colors yesterday? (Students will respond: Yes!) Good! Today we will sort our teddy bears and then I will teach you how to count them using one-to-one correspondence. I want you all to repeat our new academic vocabulary: one-to-one correspondence. (Students will respond: one-to-one correspondence!) We will see how many bears we have of each color. Are you ready to learn? (Students will respond by displaying 'Ready to Learn Behavior': frog eyes, elephant ears, and quiet as a mouse.)" This is just scratching the surface.

*TSWBAT= The students will be able to