Common Core and Developmental Appropriateness

This is a presentation by a child clinical psychologist on the Common Core standards. She basically talks about them from the perspective of the young child. She is not talking about the good or bad in the materials or their aims.

What she is talking about is how they basically seem to be trying to set young children up for failure by introducing them to concepts that are developmentally inappropriate for them. For example, there are multiple standards that demand abstract reasoning for children who are developmentally incapable of it abstract reasoning. The result is that teachers will more or less have to train these kids to regurgitate answers and the kids won't actually understand the concepts they are supposedly giving answers on. Because they are being trained to respond by rote, it will take much more time and energy away from things they should be learning and need to learn that are appropriate at their age.

It will also cause kids a lot of stress and their parents because teachers will be trying to teach things aren't yet developmentally capable to tackling. So kids will be at risk for being labeled as slow or in need of remediation when they are really perfectly normal.

Looks like they're setting standards for failure.

Standards for success will be limited.

Hmmm.

The indoctrination of the masses.

a reply to: ketsuko

Guten Tag- Back in the old days when Jimmy Sniphispants acted up He was removed from the class, sometimes by His ear(s). Now Jimmy gets a "team" of Specialty Workers to further retard His development and now Jimmy gets a seat up front with a bunch of initials like ADD added to His "permanent record". Also the whole class suffers from either Jimmy's outbreaks/meltdowns or His inability to grasp the concepts..

I say (type) that You get Jimmy a cell phone, make it an Obamaphone if You must, but don't most now come w/a calculator function?

Part of me wonders if some of the rationale behind some of these standards was, "If we start teaching math facts in 1st or 2nd grade, wouldn't it make them smarter if we made them learn them in Kindergarten instead?" And they just moved stuff up in the curriculum stuff as if the real problem with education was just that we were letting our kids be lazy and get too old before we made them learn stuff.

But wasn't there that one episode of ST:TNG where the kid was learning Calculus in grade school as if it were standard stuff? Maybe that was the guy who helped design the timing of basic concepts.

The cure for common core is a STEAM based education.

STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics) adds the arts as a field for a more holistic view