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Common Core VS Common Sense - A Grandmother's Perspective
Friday, April 24, 2015 at 1:21PM By June Capossela Kempf
Common Core vs Common Sense
Has anyone tried to help their grandkids with their homework lately?
Recently, I sat with my granddaughter who was struggling with a reading comprehension assignment. She had been at it for over an hour. She was way too stressed, obviously on the cusp of a fully blown melt down. And no grandma on earth can stand by watching that.
As she held her #2 pencil in a death grip, digging it into her workbook, she said “I’m just going to guess the answer…that’s it!”
“Whoa! Wait a minute.” I said, ” You can’t just give up. It can’t be that bad.” I was wrong.
The homework assignment was to read selected paragraphs and answer questions on a work sheet pertaining to the text. The paragraph in question was about a chameleon. Okay, five easy sentences telling what the creature does - how he hunts for prey and where he lives. Pretty easy, I thought.
“Let’s see the questions,” I told my granddaughter.
“What is the structure of the chameleon?
“Structure???” I said. “It doesn’t tell you that..”
“Yes, the answer is somewhere in there Grandma.Read it again.”
“I must’ve missed something.”
I read it again - more carefully. I scrutinized the simple sentences. Nothing.
“Can’t find a thing…What do they mean by the word ‘structure’?”
The kid is crying now…I don’t know Grandma…you’re an author, you should know.” So I was… published and coming off a successful book signing event at the Huntington Book Revue. A third grade reading assignment shouldn’t throw me.
“Give me that paragraph.”
By this time, Jenny had thrown her pencil on the floor and plopped her head on the table on top of her work sheet…crying.
“Just pick a sentence,” she cried. “I don’t care if it’s right or wrong…I still have all this Math to do.”
“Well, that can wait. We might not even get to the Math at all tonight.” I heard myself say.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t encourage her to ditch an assignment like this, but it was getting late and it was time to clear the table for supper. She’d been at her homework so long, her concentration was shot. We needed a break. So we talked, while I fixed the mac and cheese.
“When was the last time you practiced piano ?” I asked.
“I don’t know Grandma, I don’t have time…”
“But you love piano…you were doing so well. You played ‘Fur Elise’ so beautifully…”
No reply.
When supper was over, we got back to the homework. I reread her paragraph. I noticed a sentence that went like this: A chameleon catches his prey with a suction cup attached to the end of his tongue. This says what he does… not what he’s made of - if that’s what the genius who created this paragraph meant by ‘structure’.
“This is what they might want because it mentions the suction cup…”
“I don’t care, Grandma’ she cried as she jotted the ‘answer’ down and pushed her papers aside.
“Wanna do the Math?”
“Yes Grandma, but you can’t help me with that.” She had the correct answer to that question.
As she pulled out her Math homework, I was still mulling over her attitude towards her reading assignment. She didn’t care if the answer was wrong or right. That’s not my Jenny. I pondered this change in her. What was happening? This is the kid her mother read to in utero. The one who couldn’t fall asleep before she was read to - three stories before bedtime.
I wondered about that Common Core Curriculum I’d been hearing about. Is this what it’s doing to the kids? To my granddaughter? This school year,she’s been cranky and tired - too overworked to practice piano? Her mother told me that she is doing homework for hours and supper time creates a gastronomic nightmare as Jenny shovels down her food and races to get back to finish her homework. Some is left to the next morning - before the mad dash to the school bus. This can’t be good for anyone’s nervous system.
These days, I don’t keep up much on the politics of the new educational trends, but it doesn’t take much common sense to see a correlation between the CCC and my stressed out frustrated third grade granddaughter, sitting at a kitchen table, holding her head in her hands - tears dripping down onto her homework assignment - the one that I don’t understand either. Was the answer right? Who cares? Certainly not my Jennifer.
It looks like some legislators, in an attempt to impress the tax-paying constituency, came up with a ‘rigged to fail’ system that rates teachers according to the grades their students achieve in tests designed by Frankenstein. So they flushed through a law, without any intelligent fact-finding, debate or review, totally ignoring the final impact to the system down the line. In an effort to purge the system of a few lousy teachers, they effectively threw out the baby with the bathwater Well guys, that baby is my granddaughter and she is stressed out big time. She is missing a well rounded education that teaches beyond cramming for tests. So are her classmates. And Grandma is pissed.
“Do I have to go to school tomorrow, Grandma?” “What? I thought you loved school.” “Not anymore.”
She still hadn’t touched her Math homework.
The teacher said that they are trying to get the kids to think ‘out of the box’. That is why answers to the Math word problems are not exactly exact. They are being taught to round out the numbers, so if you divide 3999 bubbles by 2, you should round out the answer to an even 2000. Geeze, I wish the bank calculated my interest rate that way.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse Jen pulled out a sheet of 100 examples with these instructions: See how many problems you can solve in sixty seconds.
“Here’s the clock, Grandma. You can time me.” When time was up, she finished about 45. Then stuffed the paper in her folder. “Are the answers correct? Do you want me to check them out for you.” “No, it doesn’t matter, Grandma. It’s just to time us…for the tests.”
Oh, your grandchild is not having a problem?
“My grandchildren ace these tests…” my neighbor smugly snorted making the implication quite clear. Well lady, my grandchild is no dummy. This kid knew how to problem solve and think outside the box when she was just a baby. At six months she figured out how to drag her toys to her side by tugging on her baby blankets. And at two, she was climbing up to my piano and could play and say the five finger study, C D E F G…1 2 3 4 5. Now she is crying, “I have no time to practice, Grandma. My head hurts.”
WHAT?
Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on common core politics, but it doesn’t take a genius, thinking out of the box, to see that a smart lover of learning had morphed into a frustrated, stressed test tazed kid - dreading the thought of going to school to take those tests. if those tests are anything like the homework I saw, the kid is doomed to failure and so I understand, is the teacher. While I am thinking about it, how do teachers of low functioning students fare when their students can’t compete or raise their grades enough to rate a higher teacher score? Is there a separate scale for them?
Upon reflection, I saw many trends come and go as my kids grew up. They had good teachers and even better ones, but I only encountered one that I would have recommended for a career change and not even he sent so many kids to the school nurse with piercing headaches - THAT”S what I care about.
Before she went to school the next morning I wrote a little note to the teacher.
“What’s that for…?”
“I’m just asking your teacher to let me know the right answer to that chameleon question.” I didn’t tell her what else I wrote.
“Now Jen, give this to Mrs.Sterling when you get to school - and don’t read it.
“Don’t worry Grandma,” she replied .” I can’t read that…You wrote it in script.”
Go figure .
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June Capossela Kempf is the author of Yo God! Jay’s Story.
Reader Comments (5)
When my middle school child was in elementary school I wrote a note excusing her from her common core homework at least once a week. These assignments are NOT teacher created. They are manufactured by a private company that the state pays and does not review for content or errors. The state should be charged with child abuse!
June Kempf expresses beautifully in everyday emotion, language and experience the frustration common core has exacted on our school children, their teachers, their parents and in this case, a grandparent. She reflects on how it is impacting her grandchild's view of school and learning and, more importantly, on how it is impacting her attitude and emotional tolerance, for what, at her tender age,should have been a no stress daily homework routine. Mrs. Kempf is absolutely right. We have to start taking our cues from the children.
I'll bet June Kempf would have made a good teacher.
So good, in fact, that she'd have been an abject failure in today's educational milieu.
- Jeb Ladouceur
Reposting a comment I posted earlier, which was incorrectly attributed to June Kempf.
June Kempf expresses beautifully in everyday emotion, language and experience the frustration common core has exacted on our school children, their teachers, their parents and in this case, a grandparent. She reflects on how it is impacting her grandchild's view of school and learning and, more importantly, on how it is impacting her grand daughter's attitude and emotional tolerance, for what, at her tender age,should have been a no stress daily homework routine. Mrs. Kempf is absolutely right. We have to start taking our cues from the children.
I find Joan's comment "These assignments are NOT teacher created" sums up the whole problem in one sentence. The popular attitude of blaming teachers for everything wrong with students and the local economy has to STOP.
Now, if I may go on for much more than one sentence:
Kids nowadays don't have any unstructured time; no time to just go out and play, which always involves "thinking out of the box". We coddle our kids, driving them a block to the bus stop, where they sit in the SUV till the bus arrives. At the same time, besides their schoolwork, we load them up with karate, soccer, religious activities, Little League, scheduled playdates, dance classes, and yes, piano. We indulge their media-influenced obsession with wearing the latest fashions, which adds stress to simply getting ready in the morning. Add to that cellphones, which supposedly for safety reasons every child needs (REALLY?), laptops, iPads, social media with an exponentially higher possibility of bullying than could ever happen locally, community service (we have to think ahead to that college application)... and it's no wonder by the time they're in hormonally-afflicted middle school the stress leads some of them to anorexia, cutting, or drugs (legal or otherwise).
Now add to this the "value-added" business of Common Core tests and no wonder it's already meltdown time. We don't need to take our cues from the children, we need to step out of our own boxes and open our eyes.