Hat tip Todd Starnes and David
This is one of the sneakiest ways to indoctrinate students you can imagine. In a North Carolina English class, new vocabulary words are introduced by putting them in sentences that put a big happy face on-you guessed it- Islam.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/12/20/school-islamic-vocabulary-lesson-part-common-core-standards/
This is hardly the only example. As a teacher of English as a second language, I had a grammar-writing class a few years ago and had to use an English-writing textbook in which every chapter was devoted to the environmental with tributes to Greenpeace, no less. I always made it a practice to tell my students that I am not advocating any position on the matter or any other matter.
This is really despicable.
This presentation is slander, pure and simple. I don't mean that the exercises described never happened. I mean, that they are not prescribed in Common Core. Common Core doesn't prescribe exercises, it prescribes detailed reading and math skills to be mastered and tested. It also does not prescribe any education on any religion.
ReplyDeleteAt most, some teacher, or school district, writing exercises to test the basic levels of understanding outlined in Common Core, chose to use these sentences and themes. That may be a valid local issue. It is not a valid criticism of Common Core.
I'm not really a fan of either standardized testing or of parsing "what students should learn" into detailed components. I had some experience tutoring high school students a couple of years ago, and such prescribed "standards" had nothing to do with what the students needed to learn or how they learn.
Fortunately, I had the latitude to ignore it. I dealt with real issues, like the fact that a young lady came home with detailed notes of what her teacher covered in class, in beautiful handwriting, and didn't understand what a word of it meant. THAT is one product of teaching to "standards." The teacher was under pressure to cover so much material so fast that the teacher had no time to stop and see if anyone got it.
But the faux-conservative caterwauling about Common Core is pure opportunistic knee-jerk reaction. Don't you have anything important to talk about?