Revisioning...or reviewing

It amazes me how many of us want structures. We want structures like the set time to be at school and the time we can leave. We want the set period time to our day. We want the canned curriculum so we can just flip the page and see what we have to do for tomorrow.  I would love to interview the teachers of the 1800's in those one room school houses and see if they had the set curriculum and demands we do. Some areas did, but many did not- and they still knew what to teach each day and they moved their students forward. For some of us - these are our grandparents or even parents' generation, and we would never say they were not educated.  What makes an educated person? Does just going to school make you educated?  I know a special man who quit school at 16, lied about his age and went to Vietnam. He survived and now runs his own $100,000/ year business. It can be done and he has worked very hard to get there. But, he will never have a high school diploma listed on his credentials, nor did he get to go to prom. Life was a bit different then. Now it is all about how to move forward and fast. And it still comes back to some hardcore competencies that he learned along the way- how to work hard, dig your heels in and be courteous and respectful to all people; to honor the working man alongside the college graduate; to treat all people with common decency; to expect others to work hard for a good day's wage; to be proud of what you have and who you are; and to be able to lay your head down at the end of the day knowing you've done the best you can at all you attempted that day. I used to sometimes joke with him that most of that works, unless you are a teacher and never really know if it worked that day.  We can talk for hours about where curriculum for schools should come from, where it should lead our students and how to carry it out, but in the end, we want solid, happy, productive citizens that can search out what they need in life when they need it.  Is there a competency or curriculum map for that?

Curriculum musts

After reviewing Ch. 1-4 again in HH Jacobs' book, I see these major components of curriculum coming forth;
- Critical thinking
- Preparations for future work and work situations
- more assessment tools that incorporate technology
- a Global focus
- personal and local perspectives should be considered
- The key questions: What content should be kept? What content should be cut? and What content should be created?
- perspectives on humanity should be a focus of Social Studies
- Sciences in action along with the morale dilemmas of science
- educating the person-in health and fitness
- expanding the genres in contemporary English and literature
- math should be considered another language
- the arts are key to a person's development

So I feel like looking at back at this list, that it says all that I have known to be what makes education good - that we need to focus on the whole child, not just the brain- but the wealth of the the being, the vessel, the creative mind, the inquisitive mind, and the ethical mind.  If we have known this all along, why is it still so hard to achieve? Can schools really not provide all these opportunities for students? What if we called them community centers and let in more options for students to 'meet the standards'? What might happen then? Or, what might happen if we did what we would truly deep in our hearts like to see kids do and THEN looked at the standards? I wonder - and I would bet- that many of the standards would be met without us having to look at them. Good educators know what they would like to see their students do, and with encouragement, without the pressure of the next test, students usually rise to the challenge. At least, that has been my experience! What do you think?

Evernote

In relation to last week's readings around technology, I wanted to share a new application that I learned and already love! Some of you are probably already familiar with it, but it was relatively new to me. I had heard of it before but not really had a chance to play with it. The application is called Evernote. It allows you to take notes, save websites, take screen pics, etc, and save them in one place- on the web. Google Evernote, then set up a free account, and then you can start creating 'notebooks' of information. If you download this to your smartphone, tablet and computer, then anything you save at any of these will be at your fingertips! I am already using it for the many roles I play as teacher, president of my international professional women educators' society and crafter. It is great. If I am not near my computer, and have my phone, then I can check the notes from any meeting I was at and/ or reference any website I save in it!  For those of us with multiple roles and mobile lives, this is a great resource! My friend and colleague at DKG Headquarters that travels for six weeks at a time uses it for all of her travel notes, flight plans, presentations, etc. It is fabulous!   Just had to share! Go to Evernote and explore!

Persistent Curriculum Issue

     My persistent issue is one that has been a part of my teaching career since the beginning. How do you determine the level of a text? How do you decide if a text is complex enough or too complex for a student or a class? When I started teaching I used the Frye Method to determine the approximate grade level of a text. It was one of many readability formulas, but at the time the most widely used. (If you are unfamiliar with that, just google it!) Now we talk in lexile levels, grade levels, or accelerated reader level, Fountas and Pinnell levels or Benchmark levels. Lexile levels have gained popularity due to the NWEA testing many of our schools adopted years ago. It too is simply a readability formula looking at the length of sentences, vocabulary and paragraph length. Thanks to the Common Core we are again refocusing on the complexity of texts used in the classroom or given to students. Many of us have heard and seen that the CCSS raises the bar, and it does; especially when our students are supposed to read at that level 'independently and proficiently'. We all know many students who will struggle with meeting these high levels on their own with any type of understanding.  However, take a closer look at Appendix A of the CCSS and you will see a triangle that truly describes the definition of text complexity. It takes into account the quantitative, qualitative and reader and task dimensions of what makes a text difficult for students. All texts have supports and challenges for readers and all readers have supports and challenges that they bring to the text. I want us all to realize that what makes a text difficult is not just the length of the sentences or the syllables in the longest words. I presented last week at my conference in Portland on just this topic, and how absurd it would be if we just went by the numbers.  How many of you have read The Grapes of Wrath?  Probably not too many, but it used to be a very common text in the high school English cannon. Many an English teacher would tell you that is a difficult text... but oh really? Its lexile score is only a 680! That places it within the 3rd-4th grade text complexity band!! Now, would you give your fourth grader this text to read?  Probably not! The length of the entire text, the background knowledge about the Dust Bowl, the stamina to make it through the long descriptions of the southern climate and land, as well as many other challenges would be reasons you would not use this text typically with a fourth grader or a fourth grade class.  So my issue was that we need to continue to use our heads when it comes to choosing texts for our students. What is your purpose for using the text? How will you use it? With whom? Will it move the reader forward in skills and strategies? All these things that we already consider, need to continue to be on the forefront. We may need to consider how to increase student's stamina in reading so that they will stick with longer and more difficult texts. Allington says that we should have 90 minutes a day of uninterrupted reading time for all of our students in order to get them to meet these reading standards. Could your school do this? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could? It takes more than 10 minutes to really get into a book or a text, yet that is often the minimum schools are willing to give to SSR or DEAR. Think of all you've had to read for this course... granted we could do it at our own pace and in chunks as time allowed, but some of the work really requires a nice chunk of time to truly devour it all. Our students will need this too. It is part of why I think our students struggle so much when they enter college because their stamina for reading has been in short spurts, not long deep breaths. I created a one page document and an hour long powerpoint that explains the triangle of text complexity from the CCSS. If you'd like to see the either,  I'll gladly share at request. What would happen if we started school earlier with a reading time each day? How would that change the focus of our schools and our scores in the long run?

Common Core....

     Marion Brady states in her article, "Eight problems with the Common Core", that "standards shouldn't be attached to school subjects, but to the qualities of mind it's hoped the study of school subjects promotes."  Wouldn't that be wonderful, if only it could be true?! I look at the standards of the core and see that it doesn't matter what subject I teach, many of the standards for literacy would apply to any of the subjects, even including math when students must read a word problem or statistics problem. But in reality with my fellow teachers, they were stumped by the design of the core and my Social Studies men were very frustrated that there were 'no standards for them'.  Well, if you consider that you need to read, write, decipher, analyze and determine the credibility of sources in all areas, particularly Social Studies topics... then don't the standards written for literacy in the CCSS apply to them? One of the biggest hurdles for some subject teachers - especially at the high school level- is that they have to begin to see themselves of teachers of readers and writers of that particular area, not specific subject teachers. This is one reason I like some of the push of the CCSS. I guess, being a literacy trained teacher first, makes me a bit bias in that direction, but if I can't read or write, then how good a historian or scientist or technician or mathematician can I be? At some point, those basic skills will come into play and slow down the progress of a child who might very well have an affinity or love for science or history.
     As with most things in education, the CCSS might have come from good intentions, but unfortunately, how they will be implemented and/ or held over the heads of teachers and schools will most likely not have the best outcome. I believe most teachers want a guideline to know where to start and for what to aim, but these standards seem very daunting at this time. There are still so many unanswered questions about them too that I am curious to see how it will all unfold. Will Science teachers be held to these standards as well as the Next Gen Science Standards? What if I meet the standard in English but not in Science? Does this mean for me as a student that I cannot graduate until I raise my proficiency in all areas? (I do recognize that I am combining two initiatives here- CCSS and Standards based performance standards- but so far, except for a few schools, they have been combined.) How do we intend to deal with the even wider achievement gap that will result from these raised standards from grade 2 on and from the new assessments yet to come?
    My hope is that schools will look at these to guide themselves forward, but not lose what is already working positively within their schools. One of the later articles noted that the CCSS will kill innovation and creativity, which I have heard many times. I hope that the openness of them as well as the lack of connectivity to specific subjects will encourage teachers to be creative and innovative in how students can demonstrate proficiency on these standards. My fear, of course, is that they- or rather the assessments- may box us in even more. The school district I will be starting with in the fall has chosen to go with canned curricula for English and Math for grades 7-12. I will be curious to see how tight we all must keep to this and whether it truly 'works' just because it is 'aligned to the Common core'.  I am hoping it will allow us as teachers to still consider the students in front of us and our own personal expertise to enhance the learning experiences for all students.

Global Education and Technology

"Our national goal should be that all students must graduate from high school college-ready and globally competent, prepared to compete, connect, and cooperate with their peers around the world." (p.101) 

These two chapters made me immediately think of the examples of this type of learning that I know are already occurring right here in our own state. At the Maine Council for English Language Arts conference this past March, I saw two teachers from Belfast Area High School presenting on their creation of a Global Classroom. This course combines World Geography and World Literature and the internet to offer an incredible experience for ninth graders. These two gentlemen could have written these two chapters about how necessary it is for our students of today to have a global mindset and to use the technology in ways to advance their own thinking, growth, and learning. The course combines readings that are all online along with connections of classes within multiple countries.  The students get to Skype with the classes in other countries, have email pen pals, and actual classmates doing similar work in other countries to exchange with feedback. The teachers have both traveled extensively and have been Fulbright Scholars as well as a part of iEARN, a global network of teachers and online projects. If you'd like to take a peek at their work, it is all set up using a moodle at globalclassroom.rsu20.org .  It's well worth a peek and a great example of how to combine global education and technology! 

I also learned about The Telling Room out of Portland that offers a nonprofit writing center to children and young adults. They offer after school and online services to students, not only in writing but in audio production and video production. The two presenters walked us through an activity creating "Vox pops" which are short for vox populi, or "voice of the people"  or  'man on the street' interviews.  They explained how to capture some great impromptu responses, combine and edit them into some wonderful radio shows! You can find them at the tellingroom.org.

Zhao article

I have to say that usually I do not care for interview articles as they do not seem to give much depth of information, but this one most certainly did. Zhao is an extremely eloquent person and there were some statements that he made that I found very profound as we consider how to 'improve' our curriculum and scores in the U.S.

On page 18, he states, "When too much is attached to one single criterion, people will always try to figure out how to appear superior to others.", and "Equity is ensured more by teachers, by the classroom than the standards."   I think these statements say a ton about the educational system in the United States right now and also how we need to return to the power and strength of the teacher. I found it interesting in the Darling-Hammond article that Finland has become number one by putting their money and time into supporting and training their teachers instead of buying a new testing system. If it comes down to how well the teacher can present the curriculum in an equitable way for all the students in his/her care, then doesn't it make sense to focus our efforts as a state and a nation there??!!

His last statement truly summarized this article and the state of our union:

"American education is at a crossroads. We have two choices. We can destroy our strengths in
order to catch up with others on test scores, or we can build on our strengths and remain a leader in innovation and creativity. The current push for more standardization, centralization, high-stakes testing,
and test-based accountability is rushing us down the first path. What will truly keep America strong and
Americans prosperous is the other path because it cherishes individual talents, cultivates creativity, celebrates diversity, and inspires curiosity." (p. 20)

Isn't that what the school models and innovative curriculums we have looked at to date seem to do?! What would happen if we became leaders in our schools to create these types of environments for students?

The real truth about charter schools!

      I have to admit that I had not yet seen Waiting for 'Superman', even though it was so highly acclaimed, and yet promoted in our area. It along with The Cartel must be what our current governor and politicians have seen in their movement to push charter schools into Maine.  I am always appalled at the claim that schools [public schools] are to blame for all the troubles that face society! Isn't it that we are dealing daily with the results of those political ramifications and are trying in some small way to HEAL those wounds?! Isn't it schools that are offerring free breakfasts and lunches to families that qualify- even through the summer?!! I sometimes wonder how people can live in a bubble! Also, consider those statistics.. only 17% of the charter schools scored higher than the public schools! 46% were equivalent and 37% were WORSE!  Now I always wonder where statistics truly come from, and let's note, that is only in the area of math.. not other content areas, or demographics of the schools, or educational background of the teachers, all factors that I feel should come into play when you start comparing schools, along with many others.  These stats are just about as absurd and bias as the grade ranking system our state imposed this past spring, and that now Ohio is considering!
     There was one quote that truly stuck out for me on page 2, "...the idea that teachers are the most important factor determining student achievement."  While I do strongly feel that what we do individually and collectively deeply impacts the achievement and school attitudes in our students, we all know it is NOT the only thing. Many of our students come from families where the meals they receive at school are their major nourishment for the day; many of today's parents or guardians are working two  jobs just to keep a roof over their heads, let alone other necessities; many of our students have received interventions in their learning too late and so changing their paradigm to find success is difficult if not impossible; and as we all know, our schools nationwide are attempting every day to do more with less.  Interestingly enough, I wonder if the statement I just made is a timeless one. We created a system of education to reach the masses and try to equal out the possibilities for all citizens. In the end, we may have created a wider gap in the haves and have-nots. Yet we have seen here and hear about all the time, those teachers or schools that rise above all that and create incredible learning situations for their students.  The difficulty I see with charter schools is that many of them are funded by organizations with a motive to promote their way of thinking or learning and so you wonder how much those teachers have a say in developing their own curriculum to meet the needs of their students, whomever they are.   It brings up the age old debate of whether we should allow businesses to have an influence in our educational systems, or not. There are many pros and cons to consider. I myself have not decided if the influence or choice of a charter school is a good move. I do understand the desire, at times, to take a few strong, well educated, visionary teachers and go build a new way of learning. I think many times in  the course of my high school teaching experience I have said that we should scrap this HS model and try again.. but then, I'm not sure what it would or should look like in order to truly meet ALL needs.. so maybe that would mean 'charter' schools that have a specialty like in some of the European models. Maybe you go to this school is you want a vocational trade track; this school for a competitive college track; or this school for those yet undecided.  This article certainly makes one think and I applaud her for speaking against a very intense movement with such strength and evidence-based arguments.  Unfortunately, like most things in education... it just raises more questions for us to ponder!      

Common Core State Standards- help or hurt?

     So I've been following a lot of the blogs and discussions on ASCD, Curriculum Matters and Education next on how various people see the Common Core. Many seem to think it will force a national curriculum. And I just finished reading this article: http://educationnext.org/despite-common-core-states-still-lack-common-standards/ and it's most recent response about what proficiency means in various states. It all has been truly wondering if this another idea with good intentions, but with negative outcomes! The standards- no matter what group of them of which we speak- are always contentious. We saw the same situation in Maine in 1997 when the original MLR's hit schools. The movement for Mass Customized Learning schools in our state is a push to beat the bandwagon to the standardized punch.  Having spent much time with the CCSS since their early drafts, I find that it will drive some good changes in our educational curriculum, like teaching students to be more critical readers and writers in all content areas, or like asking students to explain their thinking (metacognitive processes) or describe how they accomplished a goal and determine if it was a productive process for them. Some areas of curriculum, like the aesthetic value of reading may very well be lost, which will unfortunately not create the outcomes we desire from these standards. These external drives, in my opinion, are given far too much power over the true expertise of a professional teacher, but then, would we know where to go if we didn't have these guides to direct us? How many of us would be able to go out into the work force, ask employers what they see our students in need of for skills and then backward plan that work from grade 12 to K? And since that seems impossible, how else would I know as a new teacher in any grade what I was supposed to teach my students? I have some ideas on that, but I wonder, what do you think?

Sustaining old ideas in a world of NEW!

     I have to admit that after reading ch. 10 and 13 about how sustainable we are creating our educational systems, and how habits of the mind need to be integrated into the curriculum, I felt a bit ho-hum, for lack of a better word.  Since my organization, Delta Kappa Gamma Society International is a liaison to the UN, I had heard about the Education for Sustainability (EfS) before and some of the great work it has driven over the last 21 years. I also can't recall exactly, but I believe it was when I started teaching in Vassalboro, when I was introduced to the Habits of the Mind. This came along with Jim Fitzpatrick's behavioral models we were looking at as well as Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design model.  Though they were not 'new' ideas to me, it was great to be reminded of their strength and potential impact on education.  I believe that programs or models for thinking like these make us truly rethink why we do what we do each day, as well as how.  But in the end, I get frustrated that we are still reading about only a few wonderfully inventive places that have incorporated these models, rather than the few schools that have yet to get there. It seems that educational change is slower than the worst diet/ exercise plan out there, and yet we still keep getting up every day and doing it the same.  Isn't that the definition of insanity? - To continue to do the same thing in the same way and expect different results.                                                                                                                                                                    
     I also read a few blog entries from Curriculum Matters  that talk about how the talk and the discussion around the coming Common Core State Standard Assessments has changed, and how these might need to be considering as a starting point for a new dimension in education rather than the end result. Interesting thinking that I hope the author will expand on further.  We certainly need to be educating ourselves as teachers and teacher leaders about ALL the potential options for our students. Then we need to consider how to implement these or some of these or even parts of these into our schools.  Years ago the discussion of whether there should be day cares and medical services and other services available at schools was a huge debate. Many argued that the school had become the heart of a community and so it made sense to offer the services to the community in one place where all had to go. The louder voices it seemed were angered by the notion that schools should offer all kinds of social services, that somehow this would disrupt the learning process and take away from our schools.  Now with the rising numbers of poverty-stricken families in all of our communities, we have once again returned to this discussion and some schools are even offering free breakfasts and lunches during the summer break for those families that qualify.              
     I suppose it all comes back to determining how we define school in our communities. Unfortunately, there are many federal, state and local pushes that force parts of that definition, particularly in regards to money, but what would happen if our state or our regions or local communities pooled their resources to serve all the people within that community better- wouldn't we then be creating a more sustainable future and quality of life for all people?!                                                    

How do we define intelligent?

"Whereas before we gathered knowledge to become intelligent, now intelligence is measured by how well we apply knowledge to ask the right questions about how to solve the world's problems" (p.208-209).
    I was a student rewarded for memorizing my multiplication tables first, for spelling correctly under pressure, for memorizing the steps of the water cycle, for reciting back every state and its capital, and in general, certain rote knowledge. I found success in that form of education. I was lucky that I learned early how to study to memorize and had a pretty strong memory.  However, in sixth grade I was asked to join a Junior Great Books group. The teacher in this group did not want the dictated back answer from the text, she wanted us to think. (We were still supposed to agree with her, but she was curious what we thought!) Later in my undergraduate classes at Gordon, especially in psychology, my professors expected that we would read, analyze, integrate and think about how that concept or theory applied to us, to life, to faith and to the world in general. We were expected to not just read and spit back the answers, but take the knowledge beyond the text.  Then I took a course at another unnamed university during the summer to help complete my minor in psychology. The professor had written the text, assigned us chapter to read each night, and then dictated them back to us the next day in class. He left only the last two minutes for questions and was obviously annoyed by this student, who often interrupted him and asked questions anyway. I never really got any answers, and the tests at the end of the week could have been completed by a robot that had speed read the book. Needless to say, I had to reread the text on neurological psychology before going back to Gordon to share it with my professor. When I returned there, we had long weekly conversations about the text and the theories within. This is when I finally learned how this might help me become a better person and teacher, and it was certainly more enjoyable. It was not always easy though, as my professor would ask very deep, provoking questions that you really had to think about before answering. The class for some might have been an easy A, for me it was a grade, but a waste of my time.  I relay this because I do know I gathered strength as a child in being able to immediately respond when someone asked, 'what is 9 x 6?", but that was not a skill that the world would ask of me when I was 25.  In this world where students can google anything to find an answer, I wonder if we have forgotten all those lessons about how to write good questions. The better our questions are, the more effective and less time-consuming are our searches for answers. The other piece that I see missing is teaching students to be critical consumers of knowledge. If the definition of intelligence is more about where to find the answers, then the more aware you are of the source of your information is also important. One area of the Common Core that I do like is that it forces us to create critical readers and writers of knowledge. Students today seem to be very willing to accept anything on the web as true, without ever considering the biases or the background of the person or group sharing that information.  I am all for including as much of the new technologies as we can make safely available to our students, but we also need to be guiding them in ways to determine the source and to understand why that is important to know.   I agree that intelligence is often about knowing where to find the answers, but it is more about where to find the good answers, or understanding the answers and applying them to yourself, your current project and the world.

Form should follow function!

     In Chapter 4, Heidi Jacobs makes excellent arguments for 'dumping the box' of our current schools and creating new learning environments. I think it only follows if we constantly say our learners of today are different (digital natives) and that they actually think differently than most of us 'digital immigrants'. Often the design of our schools today make me feel as though we are trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. Most of our students are much more tech-savvy than we are and I would certainly not know about Instagram, Snapchat, or other popular apps if it were not for my high school students keeping me up to date.  That said, I do also think it is our job to teach them ways to be ethical and appropriate with their digital footprint. Perhaps this is where the tech generation can learn from the etiquette generation. We were taught how to politely answer a phone, properly shake a hand and look someone in the eye as you greet them, and wait your turn in a conversation. All these things are still important in this very tech-savvy world and I find that it is no longer taught at home around the dinner table (perhaps because even the concept of the whole family sharing a meal together is rare too.). But I digress...

     "To move our school structures into more open, fluid, and correspondingly inventive forms, we need new forms, not reform. ...Arguably, a pivotal reason why schools have such difficulty functioning is because decisions regarding any one of these factors are made in separation from the others" (p.62). This seems to be the greatest hurdle in education- the people that need to be talking to each other and making these decisions are NEVER at the table together! And I mean that as a proverbial table if need be- in this day and age there is no reason that group from even different countries can't be 'at the same table' via Skype, Google Hangout or Go-to-Meeting. It seems to me that our state and federal laws are still from the original industrial age where educating the masses seemed a daunting task. Well, we are far beyond that ladies and gentlemen, and it is time to find a new 'box'. It seems that there is a disjunct between the institutional grouping designs and the instructional grouping designs. I wonder how different our schools might look if we asked teachers how they would love to teach if they could, if we asked students how they would like to learn if they could, and then designed the structures based on that information? I imagine, the 'walls' would be very different, if they existed at all. Unfortunately, our state laws will only pay for certain footage of a room based on student enrollment, and our graduation rates are determined by those students that actually enter high school and graduate within exactly four years. These boxes needed to be scratched and as Heidi Jacobs says, we need to find NEW ones! 

    However, I do recognize after over 20 years in and around education, change comes all too slowly. And while I believe there are changes that need to be made, there are some very effective and successful programs working within our current structures.  Those need to be maintained or carried along to new designs. So, like yoga, I guess there needs to be a balance- hold onto to the parts, like hands-on educational designs, dynamic grouping in elementary and middle school, career development, and many others, while we consider what the future 'school' might be. 

Curriculum, curricula. "the subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college, originating from the Latin, curricle." (online Dictionary).  To me, that seems a very vague and weak definition of curriculum. Curriculum in that definition could simply be answered by, "we teach science, social studies, english and math." Really?? I doubt that would suffice an administrator, parent, school board member, or visiting accreditation team.  Curriculum to most teachers is the heart of what they do each day as they enter the classroom. Some have more power than others to control it, and some are very dictated and scripted, as if teachers are just monkeys following a set of preset rules. I realize there needs to be some structure and pre-planning with a scope of how learning can gradually be developed, but does it have to be following a script??

In my first years of teaching, the State of Maine was just beginning the process of developing the Maine  Learning Results. Like all good ideas, it ended up a bit different (very!) than those initial groups on which I worked had envisioned. The idea was that Maine was noticing that more and more of its students were moving about the state and so were often repeating the same instruction or being expected to jump ahead in their learning from one end of the state to the other. It was a way to help balance the instruction and give all teachers a general focus for 'what do I teach in fourth grade?'  Unfortunately, it did not quite end up that way as we all know. I did work with some very innovative and forward-thinking folks in those days as we worked with the state representatives from the Dept. of Ed. on how to word the expectations for a first-grader, second-grader, and so forth. It seemed like good work at the time and as a new teacher in special education, it gave me a better scope of what was expected of my students by certain grades. It was more of a benchmarking system than a curriculum- for me at least.  I suppose this is what eventually led to NCLB (along with many other initiatives!) to state that all students should have the basic skills to learn to read by grade 3. We knew by research then what was absolutely needed for that to happen. And what representative or senator would not want that for all students in all the states? But in actuality, as often happens, our schools were not equally equipped to deliver that instruction, and our students needed more time in most cases.

Now we are being given the Common Core. I have worked on all levels - as a special ed teacher, as a classroom teacher at the middle and high school levels, and as a coach to other teachers, - on curriculum and on how to best serve the students in front of us within the guidelines we are given- at the local, state and national levels. I do not believe that the Common Core is a national curriculum! It is an attempt to do at the national level what I believe Maine was attempting to do in the early days of the MLR's - making it a more even or equal playing field for the children of today as they move now from state to state and not just town to town. Will it work? I don't know. I do like the more open writing of the core, and how well it builds from one level to the next. However, it stills keeps the grade levels and those benchmark type standards. Maybe we need those to guide our work, but I find it often just ranks our students against one another instead. If we truly appreciate all learning, how do I as a teacher rank a group of students who redesign their school to allow more natural light in, over a student that loves to skateboard, designs the ideal skateboard park with the help of math teachers and architects, searches for the safest, best place to build this in his community, and then presents his work to the city council? I don't want to give just an A to both of those, and if asked they both would, but I would rather speak to the skills those students had to use to get to their end result. Those are the types of items employers will want to know, not whether you got an A on that great project.  

So, I agree with Dr. Heidi Jacobs, what year are we preparing our students for? But then the scary questions begin...but if when I was in elementary school, computers were not even being conceived as something every family could once own, let alone hold in their hand, how can I possibly envision what the world will be like in 2026, let alone know what to do to prepare the students in front of me for that year?!