These words seem to cause much controversy and some confusion. I will have to admit, as an educator, when I first heard of Common Core and was trained on things such as rigor and relevance, I thought to myself "what does all of this mean?" What happened to the old fashioned way of doing math problems and memorizing math facts?" This past school year was the first year in which Common Core was implemented into our curriculum. At the beginning, the students had to struggle to overcome their mental block of answering the question "How do you know that is the answer to the problem?" with something other than "I just know!!!!" I have spent this school year watching my students blossom into amazing math students who have taken their knowledge and thinking deeper and deeper. It became evident to me that these kids were really starting to benefit from this Common Core when I had many students coming into class and exclaiming to me "My mom/dad could not help me with my math homework, so I had to teach them how to do it!" That right there, was one of those ah-ha moments in which the students realized that they are capable of not only learning this more rigorous math, but also, teaching it to someone! They are now beginning to see how some of this will transfer into the "real world."
Next school year, we will implement Language Arts Common Core into the curriculum and I think that the students will again find it to be very challenging in the beginning as they adjust to more non-fiction reading. My hope is that as the year progresses and they learn in this new way, they will again see the "real world" connection that they will be able to use not only now, but years down the road in their education.
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