RandomThoughts on the State of Our Nation and Complacency



 

 



In America we have grown so used to not fighting (standing against, not physical fighting) for or against things the government, our schools, our local city councils, etc. forces on us or our children, that it's becoming harder and harder to recognize what true liberty looks like.  Now we are living in such times where if we don't stand up and say "NO" or Enough" we will lose our children, our free speech, our religious freedoms, etc.  You name it.  All is on the line now in our country.  Complacency is SO hard to fight.  The church has been fighting complacency forever, but it is not just in the church.  It's in our everyday lives  To me, it's almost as if we have ALL been brainwashed or indoctrinated to think, there is nothing we can do. Nothing really matters.  Just live your life, take care of your own and don't focus or think about the future or what's going on in the nation or even your neighbor's life.
Maybe if I put it out of my mind and don't think about it, everything will work itself out.  It's hard for me, but for some reason God has put a passon in me to try and wake people up and say, "Fight!"  Don't just keep dancing, drinking, socializing, going on vacations, or even just taking care of your own little family.  We should all be praying like never before, reading the Word and getting our marching orders for going into action. If Esther had not been willing to go before the king, she could not have saved her people.  To me, she is a perfect example of how God's people get involved in government affairs.  She had prayer covering because she had asked her people to be fasting and praying, but she also, had physical actions she had to complete in order for her people to be saved from certain death.  There are so many other examples of God's people getting involved and even radical, for example; Daniel, Shadrack, Meshack and Abedneg, just to name a few. If the Founding Fathers had been like us with the same mindset we have, America would have never gained her freedom from England. (Don't feel condemned.  I'm ranting at myself, too.)

I am passing on this e-mail I received describing a very disheartening experience of a 3rd grader with Common Core Math...

 

3.5.13 – THE HUFFINGTON POST

Mark Rice

Professor and chair of the Department of American Studies, St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York

Misadventures in the Common Core

Posted: 03/05/2013 11:12 am

My daughter -- a bright, fun-loving 8-year-old who isn't easily rattled -- was reduced to tears in school yesterday. Apparently, while working on a math lesson involving fractions, she wasn't "getting it" the way that she thought she should, and her frustration mounted and her eyes welled up and, later, when her teacher talked to her in the hallway on the way to gym class, she lost it and she cried and cried.

I know this because her teacher -- a committed professional who does wonderful work with her class of third-graders -- cared enough to call us at home to tell us. When asked, she said that lots of kids were feeling frustrated by this particular lesson. The reason, we learned, is New York's recent embrace of the "Common Core" that has been adopted by 46 states. It's the latest experiment put into place by educational policy experts who continually jockey to get the newest big ideas into the classroom.

When I first heard about the Common Core, I was excited. Many of the college students I teach are unprepared to do the kinds of textual analysis and critical thinking that I expect of them, and what I had heard about the Common Core made it seem promising. One article that I read in The Atlantic made it sound, well, revolutionary.

Maybe it will be. The Common Core might turn out to be one of the best reforms in K-12 education in decades. It's all still pretty new and its cumulative impact on the intellectual development of students might turn out to be a great thing. What I know right now, though, is that it is asking third graders to approach math in ways that seem terribly unsuited to them.

I don't just mean things like the worksheet that included a rectangle divided into six sections with written instructions asking students to shade one-fifth of it.

[Note: As I wrote the above sentence, my daughter -- who had been in bed for an hour and should have been asleep -- came downstairs in tears, saying that she was still upset by what happened in math class. After talking about her frustrations, she fell asleep beside me on the sofa.]

No, I'm not talking about the typographical error on an official New York State Common Core third-grade math worksheet, though such a boneheaded mistake does little to inspire confidence.

What I mean by math problems unsuited to third-graders are ones that go something like this: Two kids are served brownies. One kid, "Julian," eats one-half of a small brownie and the other kid, "Debbie," eats one-eighth of a big brownie. Julian claims that he ate more than Debbie (because one-half is more than one-eighth). The students are asked to explain why Julian's claim is false, using words and pictures, and then use words and pictures to make that supposedly false statement into a true statement.

I guess that what the students are supposed to realize is that because the brownies are different sizes (though what kind of adult would cut unequal-sized brownies for kids?), one-half isn't necessarily bigger than one-eighth. That's true, but without knowing the size of each brownie, there really isn't enough information to determine which brownie piece is bigger. Maybe Julian really did eat more than Debbie.

More to the point though, is this question: How in the world is that problem supposed to help a third-grader learn fractions? Third-graders are concrete thinkers and they are just learning the basics of fractions. Why throw in a poorly-written word problem that asks them to explain an abstract concept such as the idea that one-eighth of a larger whole may be bigger than one-half of a smaller whole? Until they fully understand the basics of halves and eighths -- and unless there is a picture showing the relative sizes of each whole -- such abstractions only muddy the waters of learning.

Then there is the problem of dividing a "whole" into two "halves," calling each half a new whole, and then asking the students to divide the new whole into new halves. My daughter looked at the problem and she knew that she wasn't seeing two new wholes. She was seeing two halves of the original whole that still stared back her from the page.

More insidious still is a worksheet that seems determined to confuse students by its use of two very similar sounding, and similar looking words. The instructions for Column A read: "The shape represents one whole. Write a fraction to describe the shaded part." Below the instructions are a variety of shapes with different fractions shaded. The same shapes and shades are found in Column B. This time students are instructed: "The shaded part represents one whole. Divide one whole to show the same unit fraction you wrote in A."

These third grade students are expected to keep in mind not only the lesson on fractions, but also the fine distinction between the words "shape" and "shade" in determining wholes and fractions. It's absurd.

I don't know how my daughter will do in math today or in the coming weeks. I hope that with her teacher's guidance, and with the support of her mother and me, she'll make the adjustments she needs to make in order to regain her confidence in understanding the math concepts that she was already beginning to understand before the new standards and their worksheets came along.

Until then, we'll just keep reassuring her that the problem isn't her ability to understand math; the problem is how she's being asked to understand math. The problem is the experimental "big idea" that she's unknowingly become part of.

(Note: All of the math problems I've described -- including the one with the typographical error -- can be found here.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-rice/common-core-math_b_2781092.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

Another Concern About Common Core...

I hope this makes sense...


“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. Always remember these commands I give you today. Teach them to your children, and talk about them when you sit at home and walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them down and tie them to your hands as a sign. Tie them on your forehead to remind you, and write them on your doors and gates.”
Matthew 6:5-9

  In the old days when most moms stayed home the above verse was a little easier to do. Mom was always home. All those little incidences which came up during the day were perfect opportunities to insert little “lessons about God.” Later when the child entered school, you could still feel pretty comfortable that your same values were being reinforced at school. Teachers could freely talk about God, read the Bible, and pray without any complaint or problem. The Ten Commandments were posted in every school, at the courthouse, even in some businesses. Things have changed so much in our schools, in our homes and even in our churches.

Now in order to protect our children, we have to take a more vigilant stance. We can’t just sit by and hope for the best. We have to become watchmen on the walls of our schools. If we don’t, we are going to lose our children, lose our way of life, and our freedom.

One way I fear this may be done is through indoctrination of our kids while they are at school and never have I felt this so close upon our doorstep as now with the adoption of the Common Core Standards. There are many things that trouble me with Common Core but I would like to address one of the teaching methods “clustering.”
I have watched a couple of videos showing teachers teaching a Common Core lesson and what stood out was how they break up into small groups and openly discuss things or work together on math problems. It seems pretty innocent on first glance, but as I watched 2 or 3, I had a few thoughts come to mind. They do the clustering in the reading/language arts and the math. In math it supposedly helps the students work to figure out the problem together, realize there are more than one way to get the answer through “discovery”. In reading/language arts they are given an informational text and they read it, discuss it in whatever context the teacher has directed them, questioning, discussing, debating. 70% of the reading in Common Core is for informational text and only 30% is for teaching the great literature classics. 

Depending on what types of documents and the directions given by the teacher, as I watched I had an observation about what was going on. This was a perfect way to get the kids to “group think” or think like every other person in the group. In these small groups (3-4 to a group) the kids are very closely seated at different tables discussing often controversial subjects. 

Can you imagine: there’s the boisterous child who always has an opinion, the intellectual child who thinks he knows it all and the quiet, timid child in one group. Whose opinion do you think will matter most? I don’t think it would be the quiet, timid child although, we as adults realize that being quiet doesn’t mean you don’t know anything or that your opinion wouldn’t be valid, but children are not as wise about those things. They are often easily swayed by the more confident, boisterous child, so that’s why I think constant “clustering” like this over and over, day by day, year to year could cause kids to care more about what their peers think than their own opinion. Everything becomes relative. Peer pressure, to be apart of the group or cluster and feel accepted by the group or cluster, etc. could become more important to the child than what he has been raised to think by his parents. The group, his peers, becomes more important than his principles instilled in him by his parents and depending on the teacher, this could leave the child wide open to be guided into beliefs he would have never accepted had he/she not been constantly questioning, debating and being guided by the group and the teacher or the curriculum depending on what types of articles or documents and lessons they are given to “cluster” about. I know peer pressure has always been a problem but I think this could become “peer pressure on steroids.”There could also be questions about the informational texts being used. How do we know if the information is good and evenly discusses both sides of the issue?


Here are a few examples of classroom assignments:


  “Argue for a life of sexual freedom picturing a spontaneous sexual affair that hurts and harms no one.” (“The Storm” by Kat Chopin) · Give a “logical explanation” for Timothy McVeigh’s “unquenchable fury against the U.S. Government.”
· Write an essay about illegal immigration. “Aside from providing the United States with a source of manual labor, what other good do illegal immigrants contribute to American society? Think of the intangibles they bring.”
· Read “Drugs” by Gore Vidal. “Write an essay in which you use critical thinking skills … concerning the legalization of drugs.”
Students are asked to write about whose fault it was that “pushers got the kids hooked on heroine and deaths increased dramatically.” The assignment asks “Whose fault? Evil men like the Mafiosi? Permissive Dr. Spock? Wild-eyed Dr. Leary? No. The Government of the United States was responsible for those deaths.”

The use of profanity and vulgarity in textbooks that are aligned with Common Core is shocking and well beyond the mores approved by most Alabama parents.
  Parents this is VERY serious. These types of activities used daily or even weekly year after year from K-12 could be dangerous. I see this as a type of indoctrination or undermining of the parents beliefs, values and principles and putting in their place whatever the “group” has decided. These are children, not adults who can not make true assessments about many different situations simply for the fact of maturity and life experiences. We know wisdom comes from God but also from maturing and having life experiences of successes and failures and from the advice of your parents or other adults you know and trust. Last of all, knowing these types of lessons will be taught, do you trust the people in charge of Common Core who are setting the standards, making up the lessons, eventually recommending curriculum and doing the testing ?

Remember: President Obama’s Secretary of Education has characterized Common Core as a “revolution” to help in the “battle for social justice”.

Think about all of the things this administration has done in the last four years. Don’t you think he will be just as radical and persistent in getting what he wants in education. Why do we have to hand Alabama’s children to them on a silver platter? Here, do with them what you will…..and they most certainly will.

Call and e-mail your senate education committee members and your own senator Monday through Wednesday.
They are listed at the top of this page: http://www.legislature.state.al.us/senate/senatecommittees/senatecommittees.html#anchor539453
 Contact info for all the senators here: http://www.legislature.state.al.us/senate/senators/senateroster_alpha.html
We need to bombard them with our calls!