Standards’ Deviations

April 4, 2008 in Interview an Elder
Tags: apply, aren't, california, constraints, deviation, English, evil, history, inaccurate, insurmountable, logic, master, math, soviet union, standard, stifle, student teacher, teacher

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Any social science professor will tell you that the iron triangle is an outdated model by 30 years.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?

State Standards Aren’t Evil

March 29, 2008 in Personal Reflection
Tags: aren't, bad, checklist, coaches, creativity, evil, frustrating, gulag, help, history, impose, lucky, oligarchy, standards, stars, state, stifle, stop, student, student teacher, teachers

Hang out in the staff lounge in some California school. Eventually, you’ll hear something like this:

Standards stifle teacher creativity. Standards are unachievable. Standards impose an oligarch’s curriculum on all of us. Standards must be stopped.

I used to accept that out of hand. Who was I to argue? I had never planned a lesson or directed a classroom before. For all I know, my teachers were right to say that.

Once I started planning lessons, I found that standards were far from the lumbering, cumbersome beast all those other teachers made them out to be. They were actually pretty helpful.

For instance, I was having trouble deciding on Supreme Court cases for one of my jigsaws. Instead of racking my brain and worrying, I looked at the standards. Standard 12.5.3 requests that we cover Marbury v. Madison; McCulloch v. Maryland; United States v. Nixon.

Done and done. See how easy that was?

I never taught in that golden age that was apparently “teach whatever the hell you feel like.” Maybe there never was that golden age. Either way, I’ve resolved to stop trying to live in that past and ignore curmudgeonly teachers who insist that these standards amount to nothing but bureaucratic garbage.

Sure, maybe one of my advisers insists that historians were involved in no part of designing the history standards. I’m no actual historian, either. Therefore, I don’t mind compounding the error. If this makes me sound incompetent, don’t worry — I passed a test.

Even an actual history major just starting out on this teaching thing should welcome the standards as the conscious, if incomplete, checklist that they are.

Thank your lucky stars that these standards, even if forced, keep us non-history majors from just making things up.

Moral of the story? If some teachers seem like they’re a pension plan away from yelling at kids on their lawn, respect them as such.