Posts Tagged ‘apply’
Are there errors in the standards?
A previous post that questioned why standards are associated with ever-thirsting evil brought had comments that brought up another issue: inaccuracy within the standards.
Curious about what my master teacher thought, I asked her.
Any social science professor will tell you that the iron triangle is an outdated model by 30 years. “It’s really a dodecahedron-to-the-nth-power…” Blah, blah, blah.
Or that it’s wrong that we teach that Germany was fascist and that the Soviet Union was fascist, when the nations got there different ways.
University professors say, “When I find out what these kids learned in high school, I’m just so frustrated.” University professors have a whole semester to teach World War II, when we have three days.
Yeah, sometimes I want to pull my hair out when I find out how little they know. But we’re teaching kids without language, without vocabulary. We’re teaching kids who may or may not have had any history between sixth and eighth grades because math and English were more important because they’re on the test; these kids have no existing history scaffolding.
It’s easy to criticize us, but we’re the ones building a scaffold for their later knowledge.
Are there mistakes in the standards? I don’t think so. Calling them mistakes is as much a matter of vocabulary and perspective as anything. Maybe the standards are guilty, sometimes, of oversimplification. Maybe standards standards are guilty, sometimes, of being too hard.
Given our constraints, it’s a stretch to call those standards mistakes.
Does the same logic apply to math or English as it does to history? Does it even apply in this case?
Where are the flaws in your standards, or are there even flaws in the standards? Are they insurmountable?
