The Pros And Cons Of Common Core

I’ve never heard about Common Core in relation to reading. With every interaction or Facebook post I’ve seen; it’s always been about one thing: how bad Common Core is at mathematics. I’ve never seen a teacher (past or present) complain about reading. I think this might be due to the fact I’ve never really researched Common Core. The state standards have never really been at the top of my list; I thought I could go on until the last possible moment. Not to mention, I never really researched the topic because whenever I heard about Common Core, I usually took the person’s opinion and made it my own because 1) I had no clue what they were talking about and 2) I couldn’t back up my argument if I knew nothing about it! Because of this, I didn’t

It started off by saying that Common Core places tremendous stress on writing and I thought “well no, duh!! They have unrealistic expectations because what they want is too hard for teachers to do”. For instance, the whole thing about if you value writing you’ll make time for it. I mean, to some extent this is true but the fact of the matter is there is very limited time to begin with within a school day. For instance, within Routman’s book, she gives an example class schedule for a fourth grade classroom on page 186. In this class schedule, there is plenty of reading, writing, and language arts activities as well as mathematics. But, science and social studies are nowhere to be seen. How does Common Core want us to do this not only in all content area but also explicit writing instruction? In my entire 8 or so weeks at practicum, I have seen my practicum teacher explicitly teach writing once. However, this was to go over the 5-paragraph model prior to FSA testing. Other times, I have seen varied writing assignments within the content areas like science or reading. I fear that with this heavy importance on writing and making sure that explicit instruction is in the front of a lot of instruction; we are taking away valuable skills in other subjects for the

I thought it was interesting to find out the reason why they refer to it as types of writing instead of genres. I never thought about the fact that within each writing, there are multiple genres of writing one can do (Calkins, 2012, p. 102). I honestly never thought about breaking down genres of writing into anything other than narrative, expository, or informational. I also thought it was interesting that they mentioned how poetry is something that this committee that created the standards thought was a broad type of writing. I say this because I loathe poetry so I tend to forget it exists. I also like how they believe that students should get roughly the same amount of time with instruction for each type. I’ve seen teachers stress over narratives more often than I have informational writing. With things like the FSA that heavily impact a student’s education, I can understand why teachers may tend to focus on that specific type for a while in order to ensure that the student succeeds with the FSA. Nonetheless, it shouldn’t take away from the other types. I remember talking about how informational writing get shoved assigned and never really worked on so when students encounter this they immediately freak out. Considering this, I do this it’s especially important all students receive equal amount of instruction in all types of