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Friday, December 20, 2013

Computing Averages...



Today is the first day of winter break for the elementary schools around here. Like the regular teachers, I'm ready to knock off even though I have six assignments lined up for Jan/Feb already.

The flood of assignments did extend right up until the final days before the two week Christmas/New Year's vacation.

I had assignments 3-4 days/week in Nov. and 5 days/week the first two weeks of December.

The unusual flood did turn out to be "teacher training" for the government mandated "Common Core" standards or insurance re-verification for 2014. About half were full day assignments and the rest were roving and double 1/2 days.

The roving assignments are the easiest. I only had to "monitor" what they were already doing until the teacher returned. These assignments lasted only 15-30minutes each. The teachers knew their "assigned time" so they were able to anticipate the absence.

The "double half/day" assignments tended to be busy work this late in the year and did not need much in the way of actual instruction from me.

The only class that I actually did have to teach something was in 5th grade math on "computing averages". After going through the book exercises and doing a few examples on the board, the teacher returns to inform me that "computing averages" is no longer required so they don't have to teach it at this level.

I was curious, so I accessed the "Common Core" web site to find out at what grade level students would learn what "a mathematical average" was and how to compute one.

I intended to search for the word "average" or "averaging" to find at what grade level it would be covered. What I learned is that the people who designed the "Common Core" site need to take a few courses in web architecture themselves. Who builds a web site with over 700 pages of information and doesn't include a "key word" search feature?

Probably the same geniuses that did the Affordable Care Act web site.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We haven't been exposed to the Common Core yet (Texas) but it's spoke of as if it's the most vile, evil thing to ever happen in schools. What is your opinion? And how does it change what the classroom teacher is doing? Is it a complete cirriculum change?