Blog Post #2

Overall, I enjoyed the brief and honestly gritty nature of this article. I appreciate that the author does not force readers to love Common Core, and does not hold it on a higher pedestal. Instead, the author displays the main issues that teachers have with Common Core, explains the issues, and then addresses how to resolve the issues. The fact that they also include the issue of teaching standards to impoverished students, and students of color, help make the standards seem more inviting and universal. I think it is essential to connect with students on their level, not ours as teachers. Kids are coming from vastly different home lives, and if their teachers fail to make their classes relatable and modern, then students will not succeed.

I like that the article puts more focus on the teachers rather than the standards; that is, the standards are simply a baseline, and how you get there is up to the teacher’s curriculum and style of teaching. I think that it is often for experienced teachers to dismiss the CCSS because of our country’s history of painful standardized testing, and standardized students. However, the CCSS is very clear in explaining that the standards are not automatically “standardized.” This shift happens when teachers fail to be creative in their lessons, and when the community fails to support teachers and students. This failure is apparent in many forms: child poverty, lack of school funding, lack of teacher/student resources, lack of multicultural learning, and standardizing lessons rather than “holding high standards.”

Additionally, I really enjoyed all of the vignettes through the article. I thought that they were great examples of real life problems that occur when teaching to standards. For example, Kyle’s story of being disappointed when finding a curriculum that only catered to “dead white guys” is something I am facing in my mentor teacher’s classroom. While all of the selected texts are great, my school has many Native American students, hardly any black students, and little to no Latino or Asian students. This means that the majority of students, who are white, have hardly any exposure to any multicultural texts or experiences. For the students that are not white, they are most likely aware of the fact that there is a lack of resources that exemplify their history, their interests, and people of their culture. I think it is essential for all students to learn about different cultures and backgrounds, and an English classroom is the perfect place to do so.

In my own classroom when I start teaching, I’d like to have an equal amount of literature from multicultural writers and artists that I do for white male writers. This includes female writers, LGBT writers, and writers of different races and cultures. It benefits not only students that fall into those categories, but also the students in the majority population. As the article states, students will be from non-dominant cultures by 2030. It is essential to show students that learning can come from all different backgrounds, styles, and methods, so that students and teachers are prepared to communicate and work with an increasing amount on non-white students. Tying directly into this, the government has systematically failed these students who experience the achievement gap. Like the article states, I believe that the government needs to pay closer attention to how countries with high performing teachers and students treat those individuals, rather than pushing American teachers to meet goals that are impossible to reach without a community wide change in the education system.