A few weeks ago, a post about an exemplar lesson from Common Core led to my writing a series of posts on the standards. This led to a whole series of posts about how the exemplars suck, with the only variation being on whether this was endemic to the standards, or that it was just […]

One of the problems with having “newbies” involved in creating these new standards, especially folks who like to take a “de-contextualized” approach to novel and new situations, is that they don’t know where the land-mines are buried. Most of the discussions around Common Core ELA standards and the exemplars that are starting to show up […]

In my last post, I said I would look at three questions about the new common core standards and how they play out for fifth grade in California: How do they compare with the current standards (with no assumption that the current standards are working–they aren’t); Are they too narrow, or too broad; Are they […]

One of the things that is really annoying about discussion of Common Core, is that most of the folks saying they either hate them, or love them, are NOT teaching at the elementary level. It’s usually some secondary teacher (English or my old major, History) noting that doing things like “pre-reading” and questioning strategies were […]

Listen to Steven Pinker at about 22 minutes in describing how we’ve gotten less violent towards one another in part because we build empathy, and reduce violence, by reading fiction, and narrative non-fiction accounts about people other than ourselves. A business memo does not build that kind of change, but that kind of change is […]