Common Core isn’t the problem.

Back in 1997, when I was twenty-nine years old and an elementary school teacher in Pennsylvania, I made the decision to move back to Connecticut.

Knowing that I was moving at the end of that school year, I applied for teaching jobs in a handful of school districts in Fairfield County,  one of the most affluent areas not only in CT, but the entire country.

I lined up two interviews in two highly ranked school districts on the same day, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. After my interviews, both districts offered me jobs right there on the spot.

I ended up accepting a job in Wilton, CT as a fourth grade teacher at Cider Mill Elementary School.

I remember when I went to meet with the assistant superintendent to sign my contract, she said to me, “This is a customer service job. You are providing a service to the parents of this town. They will expect a lot from you.”

She was correct.

One of the reasons I accepted a job in Wilton was because the salary was one of the highest in the state.

Of course a teacher’s salary is nowhere near what it should be. But relative to other school districts, Wilton paid its teachers well.

Along with that salary, though, came expectations. Not only from the parents, but from the district.

In addition to teaching, planning, prepping and grading, I was expected to attend a weekly staff meeting and weekly team meetings.

I was also required to provide at least one hour of extra help for students every week either before or after school. Outside of the regular school day.

That first year I taught in Wilton, on the teachers’ first day back to work (which was about a week before the students came back), the superintendent spoke to all the teachers in the district in the high school auditorium. He spoke about teachers falling into three different categories. Seeing as it was almost twenty years ago, I can only remember two of them: mavericks, and curmudgeons.

The mavericks are those teachers who get shit done and who continue to find new and effective ways to teach. They aren’t afraid of change. In fact, they embrace it.

The curmudgeons are those cranky teachers who have been around forever. The ones who are doing the same exact thing in their thirty-fifth year of teaching that they were doing in their first year, and the ones who get really pissed off when they are expected to try something new or do something differently.

The curmudgeons (defined as an ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions) surely are not fans of Common Core standards and the new ways of teaching math being implemented in the elementary schools in Connecticut today.

Back in my first year of teaching in Wilton, the district had just adopted a new math curriculum. It was called Chicago Math. Before I started teaching, I had to attend two full days of workshops to get familiar with this curriculum. It was not exactly the way I had learned math myself in elementary school.

But being a new teacher and a maverick, I didn’t fight it. I didn’t complain.

In fact, I liked this new program. I liked teaching different ways to solve problems that helped kids to understand how to get an answer rather than mindlessly following a specific number of steps (and having no clue why they were following them) to figure out the solution.

And teaching this way helped me to understand why I had to do things like hold a place with a zero or borrow and carry a one. I liked understanding what I was doing. And I liked that the kids were understanding concepts as well.

The parents, on the other hand, did not like it one bit. They were pissed.

And at open house that year in September, they fucking skewered me.

Why can’t our kids just learn to multiply the way I did?

I can’t even help my own nine-year-old with his homework! This is so stupid!

How is this going to help my kid in high school?

It was a rough night.

But at the end of that school year, one of the particularly pissed off and vocal parents at that open house wrote me a note.

And in it, she explained to me that not only was I the best teacher her child had ever had, but that she was wrong about this new math program we had been using, and that her son was a stronger math student because of it.

Whoa.

This is significant, because even with all my education, with a masters degree in elementary education and several years of teaching experience in the classroom teaching kids who are the same age as two of my kids right now, I have been that mom.

The one writing blog posts about how stupid this Common Core math curriculum is. Complaining about it. Whining about it.

Being a curmudgeon.

Two weeks ago, I had a slight nervous breakdown over Number 3 (who is ten years old and in fifth grade) and his math homework, and ultimately, I ended up having a conversation on the phone with his teacher and bawling my brains out like a lunatic.

I felt like an idiot.

And since then, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this whole Common Core thing.

I’ve also been doing some reading up on it.

You know, I’ve been really vocal about my feelings on this subject, but I have never actually read any literature explaining what Common Core really even is.

And to be honest, it’s not all that different from what I was teaching in Wilton fifteen years ago.

The difference for me is that now I’m a parent.

And something we don’t think about before we become parents is that getting pregnant is one big game of Russian roulette.

You have no idea what the hell you are going to get when you pull that trigger.

You may give birth to the easiest baby in the history of the world. Or you could get the world’s most colicky baby.

You could have a kid who is naturally ballsy and independent and and self-sufficient. Or you could have a kid who is crippled by anxiety and OCD and petrified to leave your side.

You could have a kid who is quiet and painfully shy, or you could have a kid who never shuts the hell up.

You could have an adventurous eater who will try anything, or you could have a child who refuses to eat anything other than mashed potatoes.

And you could have a kid who needs little to no assistance with homework and can complete everything independently, or you could have a kid who requires massive amounts of help. Every single night.

You never know.

But you signed up for the job, and it’s your responsibility to do whatever has to be done to help your kid function.

You also have to accept the fact that the way your children learn and what your children learn in school is not going to be the same stuff that you learned.

This one is tough.

Because there will come a point where your child will bring something home from school, and you will not be able to help her.

It happened to your grandparents. It happened to your parents.

And it’s going to happen to you.

The problem right now is that while it may have happened to our parents when we were taking trigonometry in high school, it is happening for some of us now when our kids are in second grade.

Are you smarter than a second grader?

Although it may not feel like it, yes, you are still smarter than a second grader.

But the older we get, the more resistant we are to change. There’s a reason that saying you can’t teach an old dog new tricks exists.

When faced with a paradigm shift, many of us instantly reject it.

Likewise, anyone going into the teaching should be aware that methods shift over time.

I think most people entering the teaching profession know this.

They are aware that trends and philosophies in education change, and they enter the classroom in that first year of teaching as a maverick, ready to change the world.

It’s the demands placed upon them without the proper respect and compensation that turns them into curmudgeons.

We aren’t living in the year 1910 anymore when all teachers were required to sign a contract agreeing not to get married and have children. Even back then, you couldn’t be devoted to the teaching profession unless you were a childless spinster.

But now most teachers are not unmarried, childless women.

They are women and men with husbands and wives and children and lives outside of the classroom.

But in order to be able to teach the way we are expecting them to, with some flexibility and creativity while still meeting the demands of the standards now being imposed upon them, having a life outside the school building is increasingly difficult.

It frustrates and disillusions them, and it turns them into curmudgeons. Or it burns them out before they even have a chance to make it that far.

So like I said earlier, I have been fairly ignorant up until very recently about what the Common Core philosophy, expectations and standards even are.

In the last couple weeks, I have spent some time on the Connecticut Core Standards website.

It’s been eye opening. I’ve learned some things that I think are noteworthy. Like this:

The expectations of students in the Common Core State Standards are backed by research and the expertise of educators of what is developmentally appropriate for children to know and be able to do in literacy and math in early grades.

And this:

As or perhaps more important for standards being developmentally appropriate is how standards are taught, which is determined locally by communities and educators.

And finally, this:

An example is how this might work with the kindergarten math standard, “Fluently add and subtract within 5.” It is developmentally appropriate to expect students by the end of kindergarten to be able to do this. However, it is not developmentally appropriate for kindergarteners to be sitting quietly alone at their desks completing worksheets for 30 minutes on adding and subtracting within 5. It would be developmentally appropriate for kindergarteners to be playing a game with other children that helped them build this skill, with a teacher supporting and guiding their learning.  In fact, the standards themselves point to the importance of play stating, “[T]he use of play with young children is not specified by the Standards, but it is welcome as a valuable activity in its own right and as a way to help students meet the expectations in this document.” The standards welcome play and encourage implementation of instruction that is play-based, engaging, and cognitively enriching.

Common Core standards are not encouraging your school to skip recess and cut gym classes and force five-year-olds to sit at their desks for extended periods of time.

I don’t know if you saw the article published on Scary Mommy recently showing a school district in Kentucky that is purchasing pedal desks for kindergartners because it helps them stay seated when they get tired of sitting still.

If you saw the picture associated with that article, I think you might have automatically assumed that this was the result of a Common Core initiative.

It wasn’t.

As stated on the CCSS website, it is not developmentally appropriate for kindergarteners to be sitting quietly alone at their desks completing worksheets for 30 minutes.

So here is the problem with the Common Core math implementation as I see it.

And I know the Common Core is more than just math. It includes language arts and history and science and technical subjects.

But math seems to be the subject that parents and teachers are having the hardest time with.

These standards are revolutionizing the way math is being taught to our elementary school kids.

The problem is that there is not enough training for the teachers. And teachers are not given enough time, enough paid time, to find and create developmentally appropriate methods of teaching these new standards to the students.

If research shows that the way math is being taught in our schools needs to be changed, fine.

But the way we compensate the people who we expect to implement these new methods of teaching needs to change, too.

On top of that, there is very little opportunity for teachers to work with parents to help them understand the changes being made.

Remember that open house I mentioned where I got skewered by the parents?

Well every year after that at open house, rather than going over what subjects and topics were going to be covered in school that year, I taught a math lesson.

I taught the parents how to do partial products and partial sums and lattice multiplication.

And while that wasn’t nearly enough to help parents understand what we were doing in math for the entire year, it at least gave them some understanding. They didn’t feel so clueless.

Imagine if you were able to offer that to parents on a biweekly or monthly basis?

Of course, that’s where the other side of revolutionizing things comes in.

You cannot revolutionize something for free. And you cannot revolutionize something when you only focus on a portion of it.

You have to go all the way.

I want the best for my kids.

And in this era of Google and one-click answers, I definitely want them to possess the skills needed to solve problems with their own brain power. Some of my kids demonstrate this problem solving ability naturally.

And some of them don’t. That’s something they need to practice. And I think they are benefitting from practicing it at school. Away from their nervous-breakdown-having mother.

I don’t think the problem is Common Core.

I think it’s in the training, preparation, implementation, and communication surrounding it.

Teachers need more time to find more effective ways to teach the new standards. They need to time to collaborate and come up with engaging and effective teaching methods to teach these Common Core standards in the classroom.

And this needs to be reflected in the school budget.

Which brings us back to that customer service comment the assistant superintendent made to me when I was signing my contract in Wilton.

You can complain and say if I learned it this way, then it’s good enough for my kids.

I suppose I could say that about swimming. I coach the swim team. I could use the same training methods that were used in the 1950s or 60s or 70s. I could say, “If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for you.”

But my swimmers would swim nowhere near as fast as the kids who are being trained using the current coaching methods.

And that would only make me an ill-tempered swim coach full of resentment and stubborn notions.

Or you could voice your opinions in another way.

You could attend Board of Ed meetings. You could contact the Superintendent. You could let it be known that your children’s teachers need more training and more support and more time to develop an effective curriculum, and that they should be compensated for this.

And you could let it be known that there needs to be more of a home-school connection enabling parents to understand what is being taught in the classroom.

And when that is offered, parents, you have two choices.

You can complain about having to learn a new way to do math. You can say you don’t have the time to do that.

Other professions are constantly having to take continuing education and recertification classes.

Why shouldn’t parents?

And remember, you played that game of Russian roulette.

And also remember, curmudgeons aren’t limited to the teaching profession.

You can be a curmudgeon parent.

Or…  you can be a maverick.

I don’t know about you, but I know which one I wanna be.

Please keep voting!