Diving into Common Core Math - Finding No Water

        Another one of the humongous changes being foisted upon Hawaii teachers and students is the implementation of the Common Core State (sic) Standards (I will refer to it as CC, from now on).  Here is another one of those onerous reforms that we have been told we need for the "sake of the children."  The talking point is that these standards will make our students "college and career ready." Who could be against that? If you criticize the CC, you subject yourself to being guilty of the "soft bigotry of low expectations." On the other hand, the CC itself claims to be about critical thinking and argumentation. So, we implementers need to look at these standards critically. These standards have not been field-tested and there is no proof that they will prepare students for that laudable goal to be "college and career-ready."  This full implementation is the field test and we need to tell the truth of it as we implement. Why? For the sake of the children.  

I gave my first common core math lesson today; this standard on place value is to be mastered in one lesson. As opposed to our previous hands-on, conceptually oriented curriculum, our new program is not fun and not games. This is not good when the ONLY way I have found for math to be engaging is that it be fun. According to the new CC-aligned program, you go from direct instruction, to independent work. And if they don't get it, you reteach. There is no cooperative learning, peer teaching, collaboration, games, dialogue. They seemed to understand when we worked together as a class. But when given independent work, which is worded differently from the teacher lesson, most of them bombed. 

So tonight, I am planning for how to approach this tomorrow. The reteach lesson is yet another boring worksheet. I looked high and low all over the Internet for lessons on this standard. The way that the Common Core states it, is not only different from what we, at our school, have taught before, I discovered it is different in the world of elementary school mathematics. I could not find resources that would help me to teach kids to understand that as you go from a lesser place value to the greater place value next to it, it increases by ten times. And inversely, as you go from a greater place value to a lesser place value, it is 1/10 as much as the greater place value. There are lots of resources about identifying place value, but I could not find one on this specific standard.  

I ended up making up a game and a game board and a story to go with it. Yes, that is what creative teachers do. I love being creative. That is the kind of teacher I want to be. The problem is time. It will take kids a lot longer to get these tougher standards. It will take me time to learn this curriculum and adapt it to be more kid-friendly if I need to. I need to keep focused on what is important, which is students learning. The standards can not be the goal, especially since they are intentionally set higher than the sky. Learning has to be the goal.