Here's a comment NYCDOEnuts left on this Perdido Street School post yesterday on the NYSED modules:
At my school, I have two 9th grade classes where I am required to teach
to the modules. They are so dry and tedious, that on days when I follow
the curriculum (knowing I could be popped in on for an informal eval)
my classroom is completely lifeless. Imagine spending a whole period
asking almost the same question 10 times, while covering only 5
sentences of a story students clearly get and are ready to move forward
with. The insane part is, that the lessons are so rigid and scaffolded
that they are in fact not challenging at all. The lessons are designed
to get students to see stories in such a specific way and with no room
for interpretation, so that when a unit finally finished you get 34 of
the exact same essay. We are not teaching students to analyze
literature, or even to form arguments, we are teaching them how to be
drones who follow tedious step by step processes that require no critical
or independent thought whatsoever. Also, Module 1 for 10th grade is out
now, and it is more of the same crap.
Here's another comment on the same post:
I can tell that the same is true
for the middle school modules. My daughter sat through five weeks of a
speech by Caesar Chavez. She said that after the first few days,
everyone in the class, including the teacher, just tuned out. She felt
like they just kept doing the same lesson over and over and over.
The supposed rigor of the Common Core is that children spend more time learning fewer topics, but the topics they do learn about, they learn in depth.
Take a look at the SED modules and see the "depth" of the Common Core in action in NY State schools.
Students spend weeks on one short story answering the same kinds of text-based questions over and over and over that lead them to all write the same essay response for the ending assessment.
Students read one speech by a famous American over and over and over until they no longer care about the issue, the speech, or English class.
Students read one scene from each of the five acts of Romeo and Juliet, spending weeks on each of the scenes, then watch the film with Leonardo DiCaprio for the parts of the play they're not reading.
This is rote, mind-numbing, soul-sapping drudge work meant to dumb down an entire generation of American children to grow into mindless adults able to follow orders and instructions and little else.
The purveyors of the Common Core belong in jail for child abuse - John King, Merryl Tisch, every member of the Board of Regents who supports this agenda, every functionary at SED who hoists this toxic reform onto NY State children (including the Gates Foundation-funded "Regents Fellows"), every member of the NY State legislature who supports Common Core as a reform and finally the state's First Lobbyist for children, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, who currently is running a campaign advertisement about what a great idea the Common Core is (even as he criticizes the implementation of it by SED.)
The Common Core NYSED modules are indefensible and the proof of that is in how much the children who are being taught with these modules have learned to hate school.
