Common Core, as originally developed and intended by 44 Governors, without any Federal interference , is a set of minimum standards to be passed, nothing keeps students from surpassing the standards.
All the extra testing and Federal Reporting is Federal nonsense.

I apologize for being "very off putting," its kind of who I am. Twenty years as a Corps level Staff NCO make you abrupt and to the point.

nicely put. although teaching reasoning is sometimes unreasonable.

I apologize for name-calling. I usually don't because it conveys no meaning.
I was, and am, frustrated because I think we might have many points of congruence about this and other subjects, and I find your manner very off-putting.

otay, Pankee! . CQ, CQ all Elmers among us!!! -- j

p.s. sound, for me, is a major passion. . I grew up
loving AM radio and people like Arthur Godfrey, the
breakfast club on chicago's WLS, wurlitzer and crosley
speakers and hammond organs and the authentic
reverb of a stone cave ....... so::: 50 years doing the
dj thing with big sound. . delicious, when done well !!!

wellsir (my gender assumption), I have been a
non-conformist -- by accident of reasoning -- all of
my life, and I resist the popular tendency to compel
others into conformity. . objectivism, anyone? -- j

Your earlier remarks are proof of your inability to understand the allegory. Your allusion of a so called "Wider View" only reveals that you have no real, fact based realization of reality. That you choose to call names is proof of this. I shall not reduce myself to your disagreeable lack of discourse.

You're just slightly too narrow in your thinking about what technical theatre is: yes, it's lights and sound - for lights, hanging them, pointing where you want them to go, and then running them so that you don't have an actor talking in the dark [or a big light spot with no on in it. Sound kind of intimidates me, so my two partners taught that. I occasionally made a suggestion, but mostly said "hey, cool." My students also built sets, moved them around, and sometimes we hung out backstage playing poker and other times an actor came off stage and said "It broke" so we were frantically repairing props, and we cleaned up. Did you know that most people these days don't know how to sweep with a broom? I taught a bunch of kids that, too. The ones who could, designed sets or lighting or sound.
It was such a rush, and I loved it, and the school fired me - and I don't know why. What I DO know, however, is that I will not lend my talent to the public schools, no matter what they want to pay me. [foot stomp!]
I want to talk to you about ham radio, but I can't now.
I will say that if we went back to offering Latin In schools, people wouldn't have such problems with English. All those dumb rules that have 72 exceptions? make perfect sense when you apply them to Latin! and it improves your spelling, too, because so much of English comes from Latin [with a skip through French first, which is why we have words like "bouquet"].
Let's do a separate thread on ham radio - I know I'm not the only person interested in it.

that You chose to believe I could not understand the allegory, and chose to show you a wider view serves only to illustrate the narrowness of your thinking.
twit.

Congrads. I am not loosing weight that fast, but it is coming off, pound by pound. I am doing Paleo, which is now pretty effortless.

Jan, carnivore

Common Core is a standard to be achieved. All that you write of is the failure of Government, Boards of Education, Teachers, and Parents that has existed since formal learning began a thousand years ago. That danger is and has been extant.

I lost 4 pounds last week, so I'm with you! -- j

the danger is that we will force kids to conform to
standards, rather than giving them skills which they
can use in life. . like digging for facts, deductive and
inductive reasoning, reading and writing, math and
the like. . ok? -- j

Actually, Common Core began in the 91-92 recession, employers complained to their Governors that current methods and teaching used in schools since the 70's were producing unemployable graduates. Graduates who didn't have the manual skills and dexterity once taught in 'shop class' or the mental skills to compete in college and graduate college. And Colleges were having to turn normal BA/BS into 5.5 or 6 year programs because they had to put 1.5 and even 6 years of remedial study to do the work. We are still badly lacking in the manual and skilled labor categories, which is why so many trade schools are flourishing and so many H1 visas are required.
As originally designed Common Core only considered two grade point decisions, 8 and 12, and then only read, and etc. at a certain level which was chosen by coalescing the skills of those nations we competed with in business and trade.
Special interests, testing companies, ETS, ADP and others and Text Book publishers lobbied for more testing and to sell more books, so the Feds, beginning with Clinton (99-2000) and continuing through Obummer acquiesced. In 2008 even before he was Anointed and Crowned Obama's people began to attach Alinskyite political strings to the testing, intending to plant political messages and to collect political data. When many states saw this and started backing out of the program, they began "Race to the Top" to bribe the cash poor states into participation, but unfortunately, they still have not produced any accurate cost structure.
There is no need for any Federal Participation in CC, it was initially designed for school districts and states as a assessment tool. It was turned by Rep. and Dem. Crony Capitalists, and it can be changed back, but the Core itself is necessary.
I will not go further, choosing to disregard you argument in its entirety, it is an unsupportable, and false premise. That you could not understand the allegory of the Wheel machining example proves that you have no ability grasp of the concept, and no understanding of real world requirements.

stdi1947 - My question was hoping for a deeper meaning.
I think that people will age, from 13 to 18 to 20 knowing some of what other people know, and some of what they don't.
People who get a driver's license "know" the answers to the questions on the test, and they're pretty much the same everywhere. It provides a common body of knowledge so that we know what to expect from other drivers [in the best possible conditions].
What specific knowledge does ANYOE need to have to progress from one level of school to another? I don't mean the "knowledge" that the state says they should know, what should they know?
Well, it depends. It depends on their abilities, their interests, their life plans AND whatever is required by the state.
The Common Core debate began when somebody said "all 5th-graders should know....x." Very few people asked why, they just agreed with the premise and began to try to figure out 1) what THEY thought a 5th grader should know and 2) how they could benefit from this system.
I hold that there IS no specific knowledge EVERY 5th-grader should know. I believe that there are certain skills that people should acquire to function in society, and one way to help them learn how is to "piggyback" on their own interests and abilities. A kid who's interested in baseball, for example, can learn reading, writing, researching [computers? books? good info v. wrong?], math, history and a whole bunch of other things. If you try to force those lessons down the boy next to her, who doesn't give a *** about baseball but is absolutely wild about racecars, everyone will lose: time, energy, interest in learning, etc.
So this whole "5th graders should know x" nonsense is just, and only, that.
Teach all the kids how do find out things, and they can use THOSE skills to find out anything they want. Your example of cutting mounting holes for a wheel is poor because people are not inanimate objects which must all function the same. They are animate objects which should all function as well as they possibly can. Nobel laureates, for example, have very specialized knowledge - often to the point that almost no one can understand what another has figured out. All of the information gained in going after a Nobel, however, is valuable to the human race.
Trying to make humans into wheels will only make sure that we can fill the round holes that appear in the search for knowledge - not the square, the triangular, the dodecahedral, and the imaginary.
and I asked when you last took a standardized test just our of curiosity. Students are being taught a skill which they will rarely use when they are adults. why?

Ha! In that case, put me in the class of 'trying to get further apart'.

Jan

Your concerns are all valid, and all stem from Federal interference with the actual program as developed in 97-99 by the governors. As you have taught in higher education you will know that your peers have and continue to be the root cause of these blurred lines.
If the US DOE went away in this budget cycle and a block grant based on a school board's prior year attendance + new admissions was distributed to the state school boards, most states would share 620 million dollars each and some, TX, CA, NY, and etc. might get more than 800 million.

thank you much for the compliment, yet I'm no
Einstein -- just a simple man with imagination... -- j

p.s. a fellow engineer gave me insight once with
this: "If we were all fatter, we'd be closer together."

now, please examine how CC drifts over into silly
and destructive, by teaching how kids' minds should
work like the creators' -- groups of 10 and human-
caused global climate change, for example.
we have seen examples of this ticky-tacky pigeonholing
of kids' minds which are egregious, if not cruel. -- j

p.s. I have 3 degrees::: bsme, msie, mba, and taught
NMA's certified manager course -- http://www.icpm.biz --
for years.

Please do...or at least do not stop thinking about it. It is such ideas from brains such as yours as moves us forward.

Jan

Answers:
1. Common Core Standards is a description of what a person must know to graduate from 8th grade into High School and from HS into life or college.
2. The disparity of the product produced is why they are needed. Imagine cutting the mounting holes in a wheel, and changing the cutter every time. Obviously, most of the wheels wouldn't fit the standard bolt pattern. That is why we need standards, so that every student has a valid chance at life's good things.
2a. April of 2010 PRAXIS II Social Sciences to teach that subject

Umm....I have a question about why we need Common Core STANDARDS. First, what does that mean? Second, what good are they? 2a when is the last time you took a standardized test?

isn't learning fun? . now, if I could just figure out how
gravity waves work ....... ! -- j

For me, school was fun because of the learning.
I'm sure I was in the minority then, too.

I do not mind school being fun...but the _purpose_ of school should be 'to learn'. Having fun is great, but how many kids have you seen go off to college with the idea that they were going to get to party for 4 years, all expenses paid?

I would not ask any standardized test to do more than provide a metric for objective knowledge. (I admit I would dearly love such a test to check for the ability of the individual to compose two paragraphs of discussion on a randomly chosen topic. This would be difficult for a computer to grade.)

I would personally love to know more about geology. It was a subject that I never had a chance to take in school, but which I feel would provide a slippery slope for fascination for me.

Jan