{"id":715,"date":"2016-05-16T00:36:43","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T04:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/?p=715"},"modified":"2016-05-16T00:36:43","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T04:36:43","slug":"talking-about-common-core-at-a-wedding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/2016\/05\/16\/talking-about-common-core-at-a-wedding\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking about Common Core at a Wedding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I was at a great wedding for a friend of mine (Congratulations Kevin and Jessica!). While I was there,\u00a0a\u00a0friend of mine asked about Common Core and I suddenly couldn&#8217;t stop talking about it. The standards situation is likely\u00a0to come up at any point when I&#8217;m outside of my education circles (this time\u00a0it came up about 15 minutes after toast). It doesn&#8217;t seem like\u00a0an open bar and loud pop music\u00a0are a good back drop to discuss\u00a0the intersection between theory, practice, and bureacracy, but I think I did a good job.<\/p>\n<p>My main points were the following, and be sure to let me know if I&#8217;m not making sense in the comments below:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Standards are the best description we have of how\u00a0students should learn math in the grades\u00a0K through 12. While debate about the implementation, or the assessment, or the marketing could be debated the content of standards are solid. Considering the years of trying to change math class it&#8217;s the best shot we have at making real serious progress right now and should be fully implemented (in writing this I realize I was basically channeling Matt Larson&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=grrx3p_S1vQ\">great ignite talk<\/a>).<\/li>\n<li>CCSS-M\u00a0is\u00a0written by great people who have brilliant ideas of what should be going on in classrooms. \u00a0My buddy asked &#8220;do you even know who\u00a0writes the standards?&#8221; suggesting that\u00a0the standards were thrown together by special interest groups and not teachers. The authors are super-smart and they are around teachers all the time at NCTM and other conferences, and they always say brilliant stuff\u00a0(like Phil Daro <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/79916037\">here<\/a>\u00a0on Answer getting).<\/li>\n<li>The Common Core is\u00a0suffering from a marketing problem. I think\u00a0anyone can write anything, regardless of how little sense it makes, and put &#8220;aligned with Common Core on there&#8221; and face little conflict. \u00a0Common Core is the kind of\u00a0project that didn&#8217;t really have all of the lawyers needed to attack publishers and school districts for intellectual property or trademark violations, (at least I think this is true) so it is possible for someone to put out some\u00a0garbage that anyone could windup on some parents dining room table who could end up making a #STOPCOMMONCORE Facebook post.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We talked\u00a0through the throwing of the bouquet and when we\u00a0stopped at the\u00a0the cutting of the cake and I thought that was the end of it. What I said in my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/2016\/05\/15\/teachers-tell-the-best-stories\/\">last post<\/a> was true, as he was\u00a0obviously mulling this over in his head. After the cake was being plated my friend\u00a0came back over and said, &#8220;So we need to take less funding from military and for more funding for Common Core&#8217;s marketing department?&#8221; I kind of agreed, but then I said no. What\u00a0needs to happen is we just need to trust schools, researchers and teachers what are doing the hard work of\u00a0education and stop second-guessing them every time things get scary. The military budget would be great, but this\u00a0change doesn&#8217;t cost any money at all. Give schools\u00a0the time, space, and respect they needs to attempt\u00a0big changes and big shifts, otherwise don&#8217;t be surprised when things remain traditional.<\/p>\n<p>I started back into a rant mode, arguing &#8220;You won&#8217;t see people\u00a0question doctors and their\u00a0medical practices, but when it&#8217;s a teacher it&#8217;s a whole different story&#8230;&#8221;, but we were interrupted. The DJ put Taylor Swift on and\u00a0the bride was making the groom dance to it with her (I might have danced a little too). I\u00a0know there are much more things to say about common core, but this is what I could put\u00a0together yesterday. Let me know in the comments if I missed anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I was at a great wedding for a friend of mine (Congratulations Kevin and Jessica!). While I was there,\u00a0a\u00a0friend of mine asked about Common Core and I suddenly couldn&#8217;t stop talking about it. The standards situation is likely\u00a0to come up at any point when I&#8217;m outside of my education circles (this time\u00a0it came up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Talking about Common Core at a Wedding #MTBoS30 Two posts in one day, trying to get caught up!","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xz6U-bx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":718,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions\/718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coast2coast.me\/carl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}