Monday, March 28, 2011

What to do with the rest of my life?

I have been trying to decide what I want to do when I graduate in just over a year. The local economy and school district don't look to promising and I have been thinking a lot about different opportunities. There are many articles about Teach for America on Edweek.com, and I have been thinking lately that I need to look into this organizations. This search brought up more than ten articles with both positive and negative that I thought where very interesting. It looks to me that several alumni from the program have gone on to do some good things, but that it may be a very difficult first couple of years. The overall success rate according to this article does give me some hope compared to the 50 percent of regular teachers who don't make through the first couple of years. 61 percent is a slightly bigger number and maybe the experience would do me some good. I am still open to anything at this point and the more experience I can garner the better.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Common Core Standards, Common Curriculum, What does it all mean?

This article about a group of people with vested interest in education have decided that America needs to have standards. Last year many states adopted the Common Core Standards making the primary goals for every school in adopting states very much the same. This group of leaders wants to take that a few steps further and diagram exactly what each student should learn each year.  This sounds a little to me like E. D. Hirsch. He was a educational philosopher from the 1980s who was an advisor to Ronald Reagan during his presidency. Have we really started to come back around to thinking that school is for skill building and not for creating citizens? Especially since today every bit of information you could ever want is on the internet. Our resources could be better served, teaching students how to create new resources, find the answers to life's mysteries and ask the hard questions.