Oh, dear, success on the Common Core requires more than anyone knew. It is not enough to be able to read and do math. What is needed, this article says, is a whole new brain.
I feel sure that my old brain, which has stood me in good stead for lo these many decades, would not be good enough for Common Core.
So, good luck, young ones. Soon you will have a new brain. Soon, you will be good enough for Common Core.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Oh I could while away the hours,
conferrin with the flowers
consultin with the rain…
I guess some wizard will just hand us a paper and tell us it’s all good.
Land of #%^& Oz we’re livin in.
These people have GREEN Brain$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
They know how to count from George to Benjamin and Beyond.
Yet another reason we must be wary of any grand social experiment financed by a few and driven by those in power.
Precisely.
And read this: “CGI problems are usually real-world-based, ask students to publicly justify and explain their solution, and require teachers to open up their instruction to students’ original ideas and to guide each student according to his or her own developmental level and turn of reasoning.”
They have convinced themselves that these approaches/strategies are not already happening in our schools. They think they are saving us from ourselves when in reality they are clueless. So many ASSumpitions about a profession none of these eduschemers have ever mastered themselves. Delusions of grandeur run amok.
Well, they aren’t happening in all classrooms. But you’re right. It’s not like these are new ideas, and it’s not like good teachers haven’t been doing them all along.
Not all strategies and approaches are happening in ALL classrooms everyday in the entire country, except for testing. And more testing is not going to improve instruction, just the opposite in fact. Students are individuals and we are not robots.
More importantly is that “real world problems” are honestly social and moral issues related to power, control, distribution of and/or access to resources, representation…NOT how can children be trained to efficiently find and assume their appropriate slot in a tightly controlled standardized public school system (while others get an empowering dynastic “education they can afford”)
Totalmente de acuerdo.
That’s right. Thinking about a text is an Entirely New Thing, a Cognitive Innovation. It will take many Well-Paid Trainers to get our Poor Brains up to Speed.
Is it possible that all the controversy re the ASSESSMENTS is a diversionary tactic ? IF they drop or delay this instrument it must be remembered that the COMMON CORE will still be there. The danger lies therein.
Diane, I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of what the article says. It’s just talking about higher order thinking. Bloom’s taxonomy is not an evil concept, nor is it a new idea. As some previous posters have pointed out, it goes on in many classrooms already.
An excellent point to make when wondering why CCLS have been portrayed as some innovative, new, essential, magical thing beyond the capabilities/birthright of mere classroom servants and what they are already doing.
Yeah, the CCSS are not revolutionary. I’m hoping the ‘standards for mathematical practice’ are more in the forefront this time, but similar ideas have been around for ages. They were certainly part of NCTM’s standards. The content is shifted, and much of it is pushed earlier, and more data/stats is involved (I’m on the math side if you can’t tell) but nothing here is revolutionary.
But, even though those ideas have been around, they have not made it into many classrooms.
How do you know?
I’m sure that all of these ideas that most teachers have always used seem fresh and innovative to people who are not educators and have only the most tenuous connections to the profession. Secretary Duncan’s mother once ran an after school program, which is the closest he ever got to a classroom. My mother was once a rather competent cellist; does that mean I should conduct an orchestra?
If I were a Common Core supporter-promoter I would politely ask Arne Duncan to bow out.
He is not presenting this honestly.
In Ohio, the assessments will require a huge new investment. They also require twice as much time spent on testing. Those are the facts parents are being given locally (and I appreciate that, we really can handle the truth)
Duncan is glossing over or ignoring these facts, or simply dodging and saying it’s up to the states. He can’t have it both ways. He can’t sell the program yet take no responsibility for how it’s implimented. People will feel they were tricked into supporting it.
But what if that is his purpose?
I have no idea how we’re going to afford this, locally, or what trade-offs we’re expected to make to comply with it.
This is information people need, and deserve.
The state political actors are Republicans, so if it’s expensive they are going to blame Duncan. Duncan will in turn blame them, because “it’s a state program, all he wants is high standards!”
I know where the buck stops. It stops at local school boards and school administrators, who had absolutely nothing to do with it.
I saw a D.75 teaching a lesson about Beethoven to developmentally disabled children yesterday that mirrored the task in the ELA sample. We have been doing this stuff for years. Just give us the tools which we have been deprived of for years. Yes, the old brain works just fine. Did Einstein, Shakespeare, Van Gogh have “new” or “old” brains?
A new brain?
Very Frankensteinish …
“If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Good one!
Never mess with Mother Nature. That applies here. My, how powerful the CC pundits must feel to suggest that, despite human development of a child’s brain, publishing new and improved curriculum will magically create new brains, just like that! The desire to be in control, have all the answers and be heralded as the next best guru of education appears to have diminished the very brains of those who wish to change the brains of children. Such folly, but boy does it sound spectacular! Teachers’ bookshelves are plump with copies and notebooks of new curriculum, improved methods and the latest approaches to classroom management over the last decades of modern education. All the good intentions everyone had were inspirational but lacked staying power. You see, humans are complex creatures and each one carries a unique set of skills, emotions and sociality to the classroom everyday. We are in the relationship business and learning cannot be forced…it must be shared, nurtured, finessed and offered over a long period of time in a million different ways. All children do not learn in the same way on the same day. Standardizing learning may seem neat and tidy, but the brain does not work that way. Learning is messy business and chaotic at times. Education does not function as an assembly line. Students are not widgets or cookies. The ingredients are different, the pace varies and the production line is not a finite series of parts. No matter how easy the CC pundits race to get to the top, it’s getting us nowhere new. The development of a child remains the same as it has always been. Tinkering with that reality is nothing be a huge waste of time and distracts educators from doing their work. This, too, shall pass. The CCSSs will one day find a place on bookshelves collecting dust as a distant, failed memory. The pendulum is always in motion. Thankfully, it seems to be moving toward something more reasonable. One can only hope that is the case.
“Never mess with Mother Nature”
You got that right! Ol Ma Nature always wins in the long run. Like one of the commenters on the article said “training for a four month pregnancy”. The folly of it all!
Thinking out loud: Did you every begin to believe that the public of all ages are at the mercy of those that view everyone else as lab rats? Are we under attack from ourselves through the pharmecuetical, education, technology, environmental, etc. corporations who appear to look the other way while trampling the laws that are supposed to protect us? If lawsuits happen, oh well, they will live in the courts and go deep pockets to win. I always believed government was supposed to be about the people and business was about the bottom line. When government gets in bed with business the people better start to examine their circumstances and fate. “When progress is not about people, it is not progress!” Douglas D. Noble
Children may not be our future but the servants to a robotic world that lives by measurements and rules by assessments of and for productivity. It is beginning to look like the romantic thoughts of individual choice to grow and thrive with free will and belief that everyone will have access to the elevating subjects that feed the soul and expands sophisticated thinking, like the arts in all forms, could be denied and available only to the selected worthy or value added. Public education is not perfect but it has concern for the whole of society and represents an opportunity not only for the American Dream but a Global Promise. Our country like none other in the world speaks to the respect for giving each citizen an opportunity to thrive regardless of our many differences.
Our society has shifted into something alien to those of us who have held tight to the belief there was some concern for the rights and possibilities for a decent life for all our citizens. There must be some statesmen and stateswomen that will wake up to what is
being perpetrated and foisted onto the people of this country and the world. We are in
deep deep trouble. Oh! For those that think I am anti progress and not allowing the markets to grow and produce, you are wrong as I believe that is part of what makes us great, it is just not everything and requires checks and balances. Just sayin!
What’s in the brain that inBloom may character?
“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”
–Emily Dickinson
Dictatorial regimes are often obsessed with remaking humanity in their own image, and children are the logical place to begin that project: the “New Man,” the “Socialist Man,” all of them trained from early childhood to reject and repress departures from the ruling orthodoxy. The “new brain” these ed reform apparatchiks speak about is in keeping with that, and it exemplifies the social engineering component of so-called education reform.
It was also interesting that at the end of this puff piece, the obligatory neurological meter reader stated that, “the brain becomes what it does.” I guess we’re supposed to look forward to kids having test-taking circuit boards for brains in the future.
©©$$™ has nothing to do with content or standards — it’s all about advertizing, branding, marketing, and packaging. No sooner than the nation wastes a trillion bucks buying ©©$$™β — what, you didn’t know it was β? — than they roll out ©©$$™1.0 and hype it like it’s some kind of child abuse to still be using β
It’s like the very opposite of the open source movement, taking something that was open source making it proprietary.
This is what happens when you let hucksters get control of you educational system.
You are so correct. the lies keep rollin and the naked king keeps strollin. the only minor major detail is instead of our own national manageable hucksters we are looking at an international band of huckster who are unmanageable. At least it used to be our mafia, our national crime syndicate, our own corrupt leaders. We were unified as a country with our very own little bandits. our government fought off the international bandits and we were okay with our own bandits. now our little government is out in the open as bandits for the international huckster syndicate, one of their best shakedowns being common core. except they thought we would buy Perelli’s Miracle Elixer……
This is creepy.
I followed the links in the article and they led me to other links by the same group of brain researchers. Guess what the bottom line is – hypnosis is good for you, it boosts learning and creates a “better” workforce. Here is some research
http://www.biof.com/peakperformance/articles/40_Hertz_History.asp
Then I remembered reading a science article in one Australian magazine a few years ago.
The article claimed that Nazis learned technique of mind control / mass hypnosis
from Tibetian Dalai Lamas that are expert at this method. The article explained something
that we always questioned – how the german soldiers could kill small kids in gas chambers. The answer was that they were hypnotized and “programmed” to do so without feeling any remorse. The mass hypnosis and mind control techniques always seemed attractive tool for some people. After remembering this arcticle I decided to use google to do a few searches.
Here is what I found:
Teachers, Scientists and The Dalai Lama Hold a Different Kind of Education Conference
By Valerie Strauss
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/civics-education/the-dalai-lama-linda-darling-h.html
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to Discuss Education Reform with the Dalai Lama Next Month in D.C.
Mind and Life Institute releases agenda for “Educating World Citizens for the 21st Century” conference, Oct. 8-9 at Constitution Hall
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/09/prweb2925144.htm
Dalai Lama Gives Talk On Science addressing neuroscientists
, who research the brain, emotions and human behavior
Dalai Lama has met with prominent scientists around the world for almost 20 years and has encouraged an increasingly fruitful collaboration between brain researchers and Tibetan monks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/12/AR2005111201080.html
http://www.mindandlife.org/sri/
The specific goals of this program are:
to cultivate strategic dialogue between experimental psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists on the one hand, and contemplative scholar/practitioners and philosophers on the other, in order to develop research protocols to enhance investigation of human mental activity;
to foster a cadre of nascent scientists (graduate students and post-docs) and contemplative scholars and philosophers to participate in the development of the next generation of scientists, clinicians, and scholars interested in innovation and collaboration at the mind-brain-behavior interface;
to advance a collaborative research program to study the influence of contemplative practices on the mind, behavior and brain function, by informed use of highly trained subjects in human neuroscience protocols.
to explore ways in which the first-person examination of mental phenomena, by means of refining attention and related skills, may be raised to a level of rigor comparable to the third-person methodologies of the cognitive sciences; and
to catalyze the creation of three new scientific and academic disciplines: Contemplative Neuroscience; Contemplative Clinical Science and Contemplative Studies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938%E2%80%931939_German_expedition_to_Tibet
The 1938-1939 German Expedition to Tibet was a May 1938 – August 1939 German scientific expedition led by German zoologist and SS officer Ernst Schäfer.
After returning to Germany, Wienert, Krause and Geer went back to civilian life and were heard of no more.[44] Beger worked together with August Hirt at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg. His assignment, which he carried out, was to provide the Nazi physician with a selection of detainees of diverse ethnic types from Auschwitz in order to serve Hirt’s racial experiments.[45]HYPERLINK \l “cite_note-46″[46]
I cracks me up to watch two sets of commenters utterly contradict each other while cross talking about the evils of CCSS. Which is it? Have we been doing this for ages, so it is nothing new and how dare they insult us? Or is it a terrible scheme to remake the brain into something it never has a hope of becoming (damn you, Arne, you Facist!)?
I understand the complaints about testing. I share them. But the weird vitriol about the standards themselves is frequently contradictory in exactly this way. As a math teacher who has struggled for years to implement a curriculum with high cognitive demand in contrast to the vast majority of my peers, who prefer a parrot and repeat approach, the CCSS have been a boon. And if you think I have just missed the majority of math teachers who regularly invite higher order thinking, go look at your school’s math textbook and ask yourself why they keep adopting the same traditional texts in spite of the fact that those traditional texts are antithetical to higher order thinking.
I agree with you about the CC math standards BGilland.
If we can stop wasting time and money on useless standardized tests, then teachers can be free to take what’s best from CCSS and voluntarily incorporate it into their vast repertoire of ‘best practice’.
With very few exceptions, the teachers that I have worked with over the past 25 years have been highly intelligent and intrinsically motivated professionals. It is time to demand that professional teachers be allowed to do their jobs without businessmen, politicians and the profit motive getting in their way!
HIGHER ORDER THINKING = PERELLI’S MIRACLE ELIXER
I suppose the idea of letting our young children BE young children and learn the way young children are hard-wired to learn – aka NOT primarily through direct instruction! – so their brains develop correctly in the first place never occurred to anyone?
Why the hell are we trying to re-invent the wheel?
Oh, yeah, right: this time we can make a profit doing it. 😛
Education for profit has changed everything. Talk about changing brains…a new mindset has entered the arena, one we never imagined before. Profiteers grabbing all they can despite the incredulity of their actions. Who suffers? Families, but especially students. Money is being made on the backs of children, to the distress of quality teachers and the dismay of legislators. Until the shock of the insanity subsides, it will continue to wreak havoc in our schools. When everyone has come to their senses, and we implement the lessons learned from this debacle and the misery fades in our memories, somewhere there will be a new shiny bauble that grabs the mongers’ attention only to be foisted again on the innocent and important players in the game, the students and teachers. It’s cyclical. What’s old is new again and there’s been plenty of wasted money and time invested in congering up a better curriculum that is sure to be the very thing we’ve been missing in education all these years. What’s really ironical is these decisions are typically made by those furthest from the classroom. It’s a model for failure but that won’t matter much once they make their billions and run for the shadows where they will smile smugly at how easy it was to fool us once again. I tell ya, the time is ripe for revolt…but we teachers tend to be way too Pollyanna-ish to make it happen. Frankly, it’s the reason why I retired last year. I’d rather keep my integrity intact than suffer at the foolish whims of those pushing such nonsense. Maybe the students and families will find a way to demand the right kind of change and get the power away from those who are in it for the income, not the outcome.
yes. they do not care about children at all. it is so creepy. if they did why would they persist in fighting parents and opponants all the time. go right ahead and hypnitize your own family. Be your own cult. maybe these brain scientists and brainchanger lovers can self inflict. they can leave our kids alone and worry about their own hoarding disorder or salt shaker collection, or whatever. hey did you see that recent movie based on l. Ron Hubbard? this whole scene smacks of that kind of cultish manipulation.
I have noticed too that the 21st Century seems to be coming down from a generation slightly nervous about what technology means to the future so they are trying to box it up, shape it, explain it, prescribe out it can and should be used in
In order to not be scared of it themselves. I have confidence that the generation coming along who has always had technology (computers) will help sort it out. Kinda like how the stories we were told growing up about Pilgrims and Indians were actually easier to understand when we learned all the facts and not just the previous generation’s explanation.
I find a lot of the 21st Century stuff to be silly. And I think the generation coming up will too.
Love the comment…
“Sounds good. If you can ignore one hundred years
of research on abstract thinking abilities that are achieved at successive developmental levels.
What next? Training for shortening gestation to four months”
I don’t know anything about the author of that article but when she is invited to “speak” at a workshop/conference/or seminar etc she goes into “hyper” entertainment mode. In order to command a large fee or to be the most popular speaker you have to “entertain” (ie., use the latest merchandising gizmos as on TV ads.) Quote from her work:
“They will require a deep understanding of content, complex performances, real-world application, habits of mind to persevere, higher levels of cognition and cognitive flexibility,” Glick said during “The Common Core State Standards and the Brain,”
————————————
Look at the political messages (ads) and see who the spokespeople are ….. if someone from research is going to “get the word out” they must entertain for a high fee. If you hire Clint Eastwood he will bring his chair; if you want Sanford he will bring a mock up of Nancy…. I preferred Joel Grey and his props and I found that much more subtle and entertaining both. I don’t think that education and teaching can be boiled down to ads or speeches meant to entertain. Don’t we hear enough of that from the college students? How they don’t want to study but they just want to come to class and be entertained. I know in the value added systems there is a “merit” badge for entertaining your audience. One professor was being rated on the “productivity” measures to apply the rubric for his salary and the question was “how long did it take you to prepare that lecture on Shakespeare.” His answer was “only all my life” but that doesn’t fit into the paradigm for the business world where people are just something you count as a cost of your product. This is what is happening when large firms/corporations bring in “guest workers” and pay them a fee that undercuts the engineers in the country and the firm /corporation keeps most of the “profit” they “earned” from providing the worker with the visa or green card.
————–
I’ve gone way off target on this comment but I think I would like to get back to the “brain” issue as we know much more about cognitive and neuroscience today ; Linda Darling Hammond has proposed (along with Marilyn Cochran Smith and others) the attributes or skills/ or thinking abilities that can be scaffolded in a classroom. These are not “new” as of yesterday like the author of the article/webinar has been preaching but they do “dovetail” or meld with substantial research that LDH and MCS describe. If you want to command a high fee you have to add a dose of “new” yesterday…..
If you are going to let them work in groups everyday then by you had better let them test in groups..
These Common Core Clown Morons unsettle my brain.
Creative teaching has been done for years but the individualization is gone gone gone gone..
EVR’Y BODY S”POSED TO DO THE SAME THING…
BULLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
But why do children need a whole new brain? Why a normal brain is not good enough for Common Core? A normal healthy human brain is too independent, too powerful, that is why it will naturally resist the nonsense. The Common core teaches children how to become SLAVE to a machine, this is the meaning of career readiness, a human is no longer important, hence no classic literature, no proper education, etc.. That is why a human teacher also is going to be replaced by a machine (online classes, bio-experiments), may be soon they will download a program directly into child’s brain through some “chip”. Anyways I wanted to share a poem by
another classic poet from Russia Maximilian Voloshin.
He wrote it in 1922 at the time of Industrial Revolution. It is still very true and an eye-opener. Please pass it around.
Resist the movement of making a human into a machine’s slave.
Maximilian Voloshin
Translated from Russian by Natasha Levitan
© 1997-1999
A Machine
(1922)
As there is no inventor,
Who by drafting a machine,
Had not imagined his creation
To ennoble humans,
There is no machine
That did not bring the world
The most misery
And the new kinds of enslavement!
While human hand had pushed the lever,
And waters
Spined the wheels of mill —
Their strenghts combined
Had not disturbed
The ancient balances of nature
But man
Had picked the keys to her eternal puzzles
And «captured» monsters were released.
Like spirit, that embodies itself
Into the woman’s womb and builds the body,
The steam, the electricity and the gun powder
By getting hold of the human mind and its desires
Have built themselves the bodies made of iron
According to their utmost nature:
Blast furnaces and caldrons,
Dynamo-stations, motors and turbines
Like poor student of magician
Who freed the elements by spell
But could not manage the calamities
They’ve caused and drowned
With his house and his village, —
The same way a man cannot contain
The fury of machine:
The levers bend the elbows,
The wheels are moving madly,
The belts are sliding, the factories ingulf with fire,
And, shaking in the endless spasm,
Their wombs of steel are spawning like fish eggs
The multiplicity of monotonious useless objects:
The collars, automobiles and phonographs
In millions and millions, filling up
The villages, the regions and countries
And the entire world
Creating new empires, taking over markets,
And there is no way to stop their fury
Or to restrain the pack of rowdy slaves.
Machine has won over a man:
It needed slave to take away its sweat,
To comfort its insides with pure oil,
To feed it coal and take away its excrements,
And then it started asking for itself
The swarming bungle of musles and of wills
Brought up in hungry discipline,
And greedy rude who cheapened his spirit
For joys of mediocrity and comforts.
Machine has taught a man to think appropriately
And logically discuss the findings
It visually proved to him
That there is no spirit: only substance
That man is nothing but a machine himself
That starry cosmos is merely a mechanism
To manufacture time, that thought
Is just a simple product of the brain digestion,
That mere sustenance defines the spirit,
That genius is a degeneration,
That culture means increase in number
Of the consumer needs,
That the ideal is general well being
And stomach satisfaction
That there is One Universal Worldly Stomach
And there is no other Gods besides it.
Fulfillment of all the culture dreams:
The poles dron and the antennas ring
And the electric currents direct
Into the space dome sounds and words,
The lightning spreads
The laws and orders
Of the police, of government and stock exchange,
But not a single thought of human being
Would ever pass through these sophisticated wires.
The rotary press machines spawn
Day and night the printed pages,
Newspapers manufacture truth
One truth for all each hour of day:
But not a single line is printed of a human, —
The very ancient, hidden fire.
The grain is flowing into the shipholds and the barns,
The ports and markets are crammed with delicacies,
With hot fresh meals the restaraunts are breathing, —
But not a single crust is there for the hungry,
For the unnumerated slaves.
In ocean depths steel fishes prowl
The heavy ships explode the abyss of seas
Propellers sing
In heights above the clouds
The earth and waters, air and the fire,
All rise against the human.
And in the towns where the slaves are closed
The doors of theaters and museums are open
The squares are bubbling
The orators are throwing into the crowds slogans
About the hate
Between the classes,
About social heaven and of freedom,
About the happy friendship of the nations
And petty beggar with a mutilated soul
And overtensioned brain is celebrating
The triumph of the culture,
Thought and labour.
FALSUS IN UNO FALSUS IN OMNIBUS
human nature tells us also that once someone is caught in a lie and continually denies it they generally cannot be trusted. Common Core and all its histrionics are a desperate attempt to hide a truth, and especially a malicious truth that has been discovered and revealed.
Most importantly involving abuse of children, and a deception against these childrens parents.
that goes against nature.
Who in the hell listens to these people. I agree with Jon Awbrey. Yet we as parents allow this type of behavior. Outrageous!
Smash our current goverment, start over with only moral orinented people have no high court this time and only rule as the framier’s intended.